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Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable
- LightBug1 6mo agoThat's what's making its employees miserable ????!
- hunterpayne 6mo agoRight, Meta's offices are awful places to work. Loud, huge open offices that sound like a cocktail party all day, every day. That would make me depressed.
- Ifkaluva 6mo agoOpen office floor plans are most of the tech industry
- daveguy 6mo agoYou'd think the knowledge that they're creating technology to purposely addict children for their attention and data would contribute more to making them miserable.
- bigfatkitten 6mo agoIf you choose to apply for a job at somewhere like Meta, you’re clearly not the sort of person who lets your moral compass trouble you.
- AIorNot 6mo agoIs there any CEO out there as insecure as zuckerberg?
- BrenBarn 6mo agoNot to mention making the rest of the world miserable too.
- joenot443 6mo agohttps://archive.is/JUPmz https://archive.is/JUPmz
- ost-ing 6mo agoAs someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation
- ahartmetz 6mo agoIt really depends on the technology. Different technologies redistribute power differently. LLMs are very "centralizing" indeed. It is hardly feasible to train your own LLM as a private person or even a small company - at best you can download a pre-trained one, which at least nobody can silently change or take away from you.
- matusp 6mo agoThat's why we have state. There are many technologies that we, as a society, decided to control in various ways. You can't just build a nuclear weapon for example. There is no particular reason why we let tech bros control many aspects of our lives, apart from legal inertia. LLMs can be "trivially" decentralized by expanding the concept intellectual property to also cover algorithmic processing. It's just about how we setup our laws and rules.
- krupan 6mo agoNobody had to legislate Free software into existence in order to protect us. Wise people saw the need and did something of their own accord. We are still free to do this!
- ahartmetz 6mo agoIt seems like one needs a big machine farm and a vast corpus of training data with a lot of manual curation to get started creating a competitive LLM, plus whatever technical expertise that I don't even know about. The stuff that makes LLMs exist now and not earlier. It might be possible to organize all that with volunteers and some paid work, but how in practice? Stallman seems kind of out of the game at this point and there is no Linus Torvalds figure neither for this, as of now.
- downrightmike 6mo agoMEta made billions on AI in 2025, 10% of their revenue... by allowing scammers to use AI to attack users and steal user's money.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- rustystump 6mo ago[dead]
- Havoc 6mo agoI think there is a bit of wider social norms piece missing as well on AI use in knowledge work context. Someone forwarded an enormous amount of text over teams the other day at work. From someone (bless her) that always means well but usually averages about one spelling mistake per word and rarely goes over 20 words per message. Clearly copy paste chatgpt. For say hn gang that thinks in terms of context shifts, information load and things on THAT wave length the problem with that situation is obvious but I realised then that is not at all obvious to the average public. She genuinely seemed to think she's helping me by spending 15 seconds typing in a prompt and having me spend the next 30 minutes untangling the AI slop. There is zero understanding or consensus of acceptable practices around that sort of thing baked into societal norms right now.
- gumby271 6mo agoI've run into a similar thing where I'll be cc'd on support tickets with one of our customer support agents and they'll then reply to me with what is clearly an ai summary of the single email from the customer that I can already read. I do think they're trying to be helpful, but it's hard to not feel like they think I'm a child or an idiot. Back in the day we agreed that Googling something for someone was rude (letmegooglethatforyou.com being a good example), I don't know why ai summaries and slop aren't understood in the same way.
- asib 6mo agoThat’s not the intent of letmegooglethatforyou. It’s a pointed way of telling the recipient they should do the bare minimum research on their own before asking someone else for help. It’s not about being angry that someone told you something they found from a cursory google search
- notatoad 6mo agoYou’re right, but Lmgtfy links are incredibly similar in tone to sending somebody ai output. Lmgtfy was a passive-aggressive (but not really passive) way to say “hey, are you too dumb to google this?”. Sending somebody ai output feels the same to me - the message you’re sending to the recipient is “here, you’re obviously too dumb to ask an LLM about this yourself”. Except some people don’t seem to realize that’s the message they’re sending
- bossyTeacher 6mo agoNot going to lie, I have no pity for the tech employees of a company that has spent most of its existence making the world a worse place. They are finally getting a taste of the medicine Facebook has been giving to everyone in the last 2 decades.
- mbroncano 6mo agoN/a
- puttycat 6mo agoI agree, but we do owe them PyTorch and React.
- bossyTeacher 6mo agoThe world would be fine with any of the many JS libraries/frameworks
- xantronix 6mo agoI hear you, but many in the tech industry will likely use this moment as a bellwether of what else they can do to extract every last drop of value from their employees. This is going to get really fucking ugly really quickly if, say, Microsoft, were to package this capability up as part of their fleet management suite to sell to companies who all want their own models like this.
- bachmeier 6mo ago> it is cutting jobs to offset its A.I. spending, saying last month that it would slash 10 percent of its work force. > Meta also introduced internal dashboards to track employees’ consumption of “tokens,” a unit of A.I. use that is roughly equivalent to four characters of text, four people said. Some said the dashboards were a pressure tactic to encourage competition with colleagues. That led some employees to make so many A.I. agents that others had to introduce agents to find agents, and agents to rate agents, two people said. Maybe the first to be laid off should be the ones that thought it made sense to track token consumption. Goodhart's Law doesn't even apply in this scenario because that's a dumb metric whether or not you're using it to evaluate employees.
- idle_zealot 6mo ago> that's a dumb metric whether or not you're using it to evaluate employees Only if you assume in good faith that the point is to evaluate employees for productivity on some stated goal for the company or role. If you try to view the metric from other possible positions, the one I think fits best is the promotion of token consumption by all means. This is useful for signaling to the broader market that AI is profitable and merits more investment, and may be part of a deal between them and whoever they're buying tokens from. It makes more sense to me that Meta would be more interested in leveraging its control over people to manipulate the state of the world, market, and general sentiment than having them work on stable, well-established and market-dominant software services that really only need to be kept chugging along. Isn't mass-manipulation their whole business? Why wouldn't they use their employees and internal structure to contribute?
- strongpigeon 6mo agoHaving worked in big tech, I can almost guarantee you you’re overthinking this.
- strongpigeon 6mo agoNot that I disagree with you, but I’ve heard of such tactic being used in some orgs at both Google and Microsoft as well. It seems like a common conclusion from a management that wants to push for AI adoption. I doubt it’s super effective, but we’ll see how it turns out.
- androiddrew 6mo agoI believe that's the point.
- deanCommie 6mo agoEvery big tech company's embrace of AI is making all of their employees miserable. Whereas if you're half-competent and at a startup, the AI is an incredible opportunity to try to leap ahead while the prices are subsidized (by the big tech behemoths fighting wth each other) The reason is a complete inversion of Ownership and Agency. For a decade of ZIRP, big tech convinced its employees that they're "changing the world", and what we did mattered. Sure the exhorbitant salaries and constantly rising stock value didn't hurt, but honestly other than the FIRE cultists, for most of us the difference between 200k/year and 800k/year didn't feel much day to day (other than the ability to buy a house or something, and feel safe with a retirement nest egg). No, most people were missionaries not mercanaries. 2021 was the first crack. The comps went crazy, half the industry turned over, and the ones who didn't felt a bitter sting where it became blatantly clear that all the new arrivals were just in it for the $$$, and the companies were willing to pay for the backfills but not to reward the loyalty of the missionaries. Then came the yearly layoffs, chipping away further, and reminding every employee that they're at the mercy of a spreadsheet and the whims of people 3 levels above them in the org chart, in spite of the economic reality of their product, or their personal productivity. And now we're here, and it's clear that all of the above is still relevant. The old-timers that hung around see that their personal output doesn't matter, their product's PnL doesn't matter. All that matters is 1) the company's AI strategy (and if they're not part of it, they're secondary), and 2) tokenmaxing. How can anyone find joy in this environment unless they're purely in it for the comp? I couldn't. I left my big tech job in December after 15 years, and have not been this happy at work since pre-COVID.
- kogasa240p 6mo agoGood post >2021 was the first crack. The comps went crazy, half the industry turned over, and the ones who didn't felt a bitter sting where it became blatantly clear that all the new arrivals were just in it for the $$$, and the companies were willing to pay for the backfills but not to reward the loyalty of the missionaries. Also SVB collapsed in late 2022, notice that AI hype started right after.
- iugtmkbdfil834 6mo ago
- _doctor_love 6mo agoI love the quote in there from Boz that basically says "no you can't opt out fuck off"
- camillomiller 6mo agoPeople focus a lot on how Zuckerberg is a deranged sociopath, but I think Bosworth should get the same criticism if not worse. The good face he put on while fucking over the world is utterly disgusting. I got to a point where I just wish ill fate to these people, because there is really no other process by which they can be slowed down or stopped.
- stephc_int13 6mo agoI believe that any kind of partial automation is going to make the job more soul-crushing. Ford style assembly lines made the work of the factory workers more miserable. Partially automated cashier did the same thing. I don't think there is any point in trying to resist automation, as the efficiency benefits are too important.
- layer8 6mo agoEfficiency gains are more important than people not having to spend their working life with soul-crushing tasks? I don’t quite follow.
- stephc_int13 6mo agoThe assumption is that orders of magnitude more people will benefit from the efficiency gains, like it was the case in agriculture automation or factory work automation. In those cases, that led to a transition period, nowadays only a small fraction of the human population is working to produce food, and their job is more about planning, finance and orchestration of machine work, but many specialised jobs were lost or made miserable in the process. IMHO any job that can be done by a machine should not be done by a human, the tricky part is going there with as little undesirable effects as possible.
- daveguy 6mo agoYes, eventually we will all be able to enjoy our delicious algorithm, attention, and data sandwiches on our lunch breaks.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- archagon 6mo agoAll this skips the fundamental question: can this job be done by a machine? Or does the job just have a vaguely machine-doable look, particularly to those outside the trenches? Because the latter is how you get the software engineering equivalent of collapsing bridges, en masse.
- shevy-java 6mo agoWell, that's the goal of AI Skynet - it has no need for humans. Did nobody learn from that movie?
- rl3 6mo agoIt occurred to me recently that AI's degradation of the human factor via way of increased pressure on the remaining ranks of humans might actually be far more damaging than the AI's output itself.
- Giorgi 6mo agoMeta has been banning it's core users for months now, above 20 million users are now banned, they are on death spiral after that Metaverse fiasco. https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/nbc-5-responds/meta-users-continue-report-disabled-accounts/4014683/ https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/nbc-5-responds/meta-users-contin...
- onlytue 6mo agoAs someone who hasn’t spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I’m not shocked at all.
- outside1234 6mo agoI am not a big fan of unions, but we need some form of union as soon as possible.
- dawnerd 6mo agoI came to that conclusion the other day after reading all of the layoff letters. The big corp tech workers def need to start considering it.
- Cyph0n 6mo agoOne of humanity’s greatest inventions imo. Just imagine a world where we didn’t have the ability to mobilize a workforce in pursuit of a common goal.
- alex1138 6mo agoDon't worry! There was a link about how Facebook Workplace censored the word unionize
- softwaredoug 6mo agoI noticed a lot more joy using AI from people at smaller companies or working by themselves :) I say this as someone self employed that burned almost $1000 on tokens last month. And had. A lot of fun doing it.
- j-bos 6mo agoBeen feeling that energy too, trying so hard to stay at my current big co job for the health insurance. But the draw is pulling me hard.
- foota 6mo agoI've generally assumed that AI would make developers get lower compensation because of the lowered quantity of developers required for the same output, but this raises the possibility of it actually increasing if more developers end up doing their own things instead of entering the broader labor market :)
- bdangubic 6mo agothe problem is that very few to none SWEs “doing their own thing” will ever make a penny out if it. whatever they do, if it actually makes a little traction, will be cloned and copied in a week by someone else. this whole idea that “we’ll see a 1-person billion dollar startup” is as silly as it gets
- loeg 6mo agoIt could increase compensation by growing the economy. (E.g., perhaps counterintuitively, skilled immigration has this effect.)
- abalashov 6mo agoI work by myself and feel no joy in using AI.
- echelon 6mo agoI work for myself and I absolutely love AI. I'm able to get 3x the work done. Greenfield stuff appears almost immediately. My job is providing value to customers, not worshipping at the cathedral of software that will last forever. Nothing lasts forever. Start treating software as ephemeral. It'll click. This doesn't mean write low quality, unmaintainable software. It just means focus on getting stuff to your customer. Writing in super typesafe languages with the highest level of strictness helps a lot. My AI stack is Rust and Typescript.
- synergy20 6mo agofrom a different perspective, there are way more people who are truly miserable these days comparing to these who earn probably more than half a million per year on average. we must live in parallel universe.
- loeg 6mo agoI don't think the median Meta employee earns more than $500,000. Certainly a big chunk do. Just to envelope math some of this: getting GE (~15%?) ratings at IC5 (plurality of employees) in a SWE/PE role in a west coast metro (95-100% pay scale) puts you somewhere around $550,000 with a flat stock price. (But most employees will get lower ratings.) I haven't run the numbers with the smaller 2026 refreshers and revised "Checkpoint" rating scale.
- moneycantbuy 6mo agounionize
- TinyBig 6mo agoOn top of token tracking, they're also scoring employees on how much they teach Ai to their colleagues. As bad as the token dashboard sounds, employees being forced to try to mine each other for credit sounds worse.
- vrganj 6mo agoModern elites forgot that treating workers nicely was the compromise we as a society settled on because the alternative is pitchforks and torched homes.
- swingboy 6mo agoI fear it's only a matter of time until someone with nothing to lose does more than throw a molotov as Sama's house.
- xyst 6mo agowho cares? just like the uhc ceo, they will get replaced. working class is replaceable. So is the "executive" class. Only the billionaire/epstein class will prevail in this hyper capitalistic society.
- allthetime 6mo agoImagine other possibilities.
- Tenoke 6mo agoIn 2019 I suggested[0] you might reach AGI if you train on computer usage - mouse movement, keypresses, what's on the screen etc. - and it sounds like Meta are kind of trying some form of it. 0. https://svilentodorov.xyz/blog/human-imitating-task/ https://svilentodorov.xyz/blog/human-imitating-task/
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- codemog 6mo agoA lot of people had this idea. You’re going to have to take a vague idea to fruition if you want the props you’re looking for.
- Tenoke 6mo agoCan you point me to them? I couldn't find anyone writing a version of that idea back then, I'd be curious to read how others framed it.
- loeg 6mo agoMark hates leakers, so it is kind of intensely funny that the NYT seems to have a direct line to probably dozens of ICs. Ultimately, it's hard to keep secrets shared with 70,000 employees.
- asveikau 6mo agoYears ago when following what Zuckerberg did occupied more space in my brain, it struck me that he can "hate leakers" but not look inward and change his behavior in a way that doesn't upset people and make them want to leak. He is a very reactionary guy, and not a "how can I be the change" or "what did I do to cause this" kind of guy. I thought of this during his various scandals at the end of the 2010s. Everything was a PR reaction for him, rather than looking inward. The best PR is not being an asshole. I wonder if he's thought about it.
- loeg 6mo agoI don't think there's any possible way to behave to satisfy every single employee of tens of thousands.
- asveikau 6mo agoCan't please every human alive, so I might as well not try to do any better. This is a very Zuckerbergian take.
- alex1138 6mo agoHe'd please a lot more people if the feed hadn't been filled with crap - out of order, at that - that nobody ever subscribed to in the first place, causing them to miss actual posts from friends (whatever you think of 'social media', his website is fucking broken) for YEARS AND YEARS AND YEARS
- senordevnyc 6mo ago[flagged]
- jp57 6mo agoThey mention Meta's layoffs, which probably have more impact on employee morale than the AI stuff. My current theory of tech layoffs is that over the last decade or so, churn-inducing practices like stack-ranking have gone out of vogue. One can speculate as to why this happened. Perhaps generational made middle management unwilling to do the dirty work? Nevertheless it happened. However, companies still want to, and some would argue need to, eliminate low performers, so now they periodically do a companywide reduction in force and frame it with whatever justification is handy, macroeconomic conditions, AI, whatever. This hypothesis would explain phenomena like companies hiring aggressively during or after a layoff, and why the layoffs keep happening year after year.
- xingped 6mo agoOh don't worry your pretty little head, stack-ranking and churning are still _very_ in vogue with the tech companies.
- Ifkaluva 6mo agoNot sure about other tech cos, I think Meta and Amazon currently do stack ranking. It seems to be a thing that comes and goes as the job market is weaker or stronger
- DragonStrength 6mo agoWell, yeah, management sees a weak labor market and imagines the ability to fire all those troublesome engineers. Remember, especially in recent years, tech management is made up predominantly of grads from a select set of "elite" universities, whose caliber is determined mostly by how rich the parents are. It's no surprise we're in a moment of extreme labor disdain. The idea engineers with years of education are as fungible as manual labor has been tried again and again with the same results. LLMs won't change that.
- whyenot 6mo ago> It's no surprise we're in a moment of extreme labor disdain. So sad to think that a generation or two ago, everyone wanted to emulate the HP Way. Now all of that is gone and unless you are a superstar, you're just a commodity to be managed, and extinguished when the time comes.
- _doctor_love 6mo agoSorry, going to have to disagree with you there friend. It is not the case that everyone wanted to emulate the HP Way. The HP Way represented the best of Silicon Valley thinking, and if you read the book, you will see that even those guys were an outlier. I remember that there is a passage in the book where the HP guys go and meet with other leaders of American corporations, and most of them felt that they did not have any kind of obligation back to society. I am a huge fan of the HP Way, but they were unusual, and not the norm.
- jimbokun 6mo agoThat and the large technology companies don’t really have many ideas for new software or features that will make them more money. Can only increase profits by reducing costs.
- menloshark 6mo agoHere's how things play out: Zuck gets some idea, he's surrounded by a bunch of yes men who say "yes, this will definitely change the world", then it turns into this optics game of kissing the ring. You ask yourself "how could they blow 80B on the Metaverse like that", this is how. DON'T JOIN META, no matter how fast the recruiters reply to your messages. No matter how cool the work sounds (the managers lie in team matching). There's a reason why the average tenure is <2 years. It's a toxic and fear based culture. You join, the people around you are already thinking how to scapegoat you. People gatekeep actual work and save it for political favorites and everyone else on the outside is stuck cooking up bullshit projects. If you do manage to find work on your own, people will immediately start scheming to steal it
- gerdesj 6mo agoIs this supposition or first hand experience?
- menloshark 6mo agoThe latter. I've seen so much unethical shit here, I'd love to give more detail but I'd probably dox myself
- janussunaj 6mo agoDon't let it break you. Take whatever money you made and run. The rest of big tech isn't much better. Big G is less stressful, but you'll see vicious and cringey behavior left and right. Hyped large startups are cults and 100% cringe. Meta is kind of the worst of both worlds though. "But they pay so well". Yeah, also: life is short.
- cindyllm 6mo ago[dead]
- poopiokaka 6mo ago[dead]
- ceejayoz 6mo ago> “This data is very tightly controlled,” Mr. Bosworth replied. “This will not be a leak risk.” Ooof. Famous last words.
- jmyeet 6mo agoIt's hard not to look at Meta and come away with any conclusion other than they shit the bed. Hard. I think the last good move Meta made was buying IG. Maybe not good for IG users but absolutely a great move for Meta. Not quite as good as Google buying Youtube but it's up there. Best $1 billion any company has probably spent. But Facebook is a graveyard of conspiracy theory Debras, anti-vaxxers and your racist uncle just posting links all day. Sharing links was a contentious decision and it clearly improves short-term engagement but (IMHO) it destroys the platfrom's initial purpose of keeping in touch with friends and family. Let's not forget too that Meta spent probably billions on building its own crypto (ie Libra). But that was just a taste of what was to come. The Metaverse was one of the largest boondoggles in corporate history. $70B+ with no product-market fit. It was an entirely ego-driven "build it and theyw ill come" moment from somebody who doesn't know waht to do with the empire he's built who is surrounded by Yes Men. Facebook and AI feels a lot like Microsoft and mobile. Microsoft just completely missed the boat based on poor leadership and conflicting priorities (eg wanting one Windows code base for all devices). Facebook has a huge corpus of human communication and engagement, which should be a treasure trove for building AI but I don't think anybody really believes Meta knows what they're doing or will get anywhere doing it. I've seen in this in big tech companies: big initatives get well-funded. Seasoned veterans swoop in and cash the fattest checks (in bonus stock) until the entire thing falls apart. Think Google Wave. What I really think is going to kill these companies is the corporate layoffs or, rather, what they represent. They represent big tech companies turning into Corporate America where politics defines your careers, the company seems incapable of doing anything due to competing fiefdoms (a la Intel) and middle management just reorganizes every 6-12 months so nobody in management ever faces the consequences of their actions. Monitoring your employees keystrokes with AI ins't going to help either. But management (or the consultants they end up paying) are never going to come to the conclusion that the problem is management.
- casey2 6mo ago[flagged]
- mnmnmn 6mo ago[dead]
- Kapura 6mo agopikachu_zoom.gif
- jijji 6mo agoFacebook the web site reminds me of a really bad implementation of MySpace. MySpace was better, even in 2003. There are hundreds of usability bugs that exist on various parts of the platform that for over a decade remain unfixed. For a company that has 78,000 employees, you would think one of them might want to dig in and fix the web interface bugs. What's weird is in the age of Claude Code, it would probably take one software engineer a week to fix all of them, so its really pure incompetence. I think they spend more time on automation around restricting the usage of the platform that they forgot about the user interface bugs that plague it. Also, avoid using Meta Pay aka Facebook Payments, where a user can send a payment to another user via the Messenger app. Someone sent me money a few weeks ago, and a two weeks alter they still have the payment marked as "Completed" on the sending side, and "Cancelled" on the receiving side. I told the sender to just do a chargeback with their bank because Facebook basically stole the money. Don't use Meta Pay for sending payments to anyone. Then when you try to open a "case" about it, you call a call center in Indonesia and the people have no access to see anything about the transaction, they just send it up the chain, only to have an automated response telling you to do something that the web site doesn't even offer as an option. I don't think there is any humans in the loop, besides the Indonesian call center that has no access to any of what you're calling about.
- scabby 6mo agoWhat come to the UI bugs, I don’t think the users was never really in their focus in the sense of usability. Users are there only to make profit.
- sharts 6mo agoWho cares? These folks chose that path. Why should anyone sympathize?
- cadamsdotcom 6mo agoUber burning its whole AI budget in 4 months instead of 12, companies everywhere pressing employees to use AI whether or not it makes sense.. My cofounder and I get to “only” pay $200/mo to build our product while the hyperscalers burning tokens like crazy stave off price rises for people like us - thanks Zuck!
- wg0 6mo agoThis is the same visionary that: - Renamed a well known brand. - Wasted billions of dollars on cartoonish third grade glitchy and buggy VR world claiming it's the future. And now he's all in on AI and now models are closed sources. Because.
- monksy 6mo agoI can't wait till we get VC money coming back and the recruiting strategy is engineering freedom and merit.
- aenis 6mo agoStill amazes me anyone uses facebook. I can understand smoking or drinking, there is a chemical dependency. But that absolute crap? Its "las vegas slot machines at 4am" level miserable.
- syngrog66 6mo agoZuck is a billionaire sociopath. All else flows from that.
- jcgrillo 6mo agoIt's hilarious they're using "AI" as the excuse to do all this dystopian zero theorem shit. This is web3 all over again, just bigger and more "disruptive". AI isn't useful in and of itself, just as a blanket excuse to justify the craven impulses of the most ethically bankrupt tech functionaries. Disgusting.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6mo agoAlternative to archive.is No CAPTCHA, no Javascript, no DDoS directed at blog, no geoblocking https://static.nytimes.com/narrated-articles/synthetic/article-c85b17a8-be10-5ce5-8363-e3541f7751f6/job-1778249950032/article-c85b17a8-be10-5ce5-8363-e3541f7751f6-job-1778249950032.mp3 https://static.nytimes.com/narrated-articles/synthetic/artic...
- shmerl 6mo agoAs if anyone would trust explanations on why they are gathering data. Data is data and can be used for whatever.
- giancarlostoro 6mo agoMan, is Mark hiring someone to run this dumpster fire? I'll take a pay cut (compared to whoever is doing so now) and give it a vision to aim towards instead of the mindless laps he seems to be running through, I'll leave after a year, and it will likely still produce a better outcome than whatever is going on with it right now. I'm a nobody software developer, but I love tech and hate to see what could otherwise be successful fail. I don't understand why he's struggling so hard with this stuff. AI shouldn't be forced on its employees or users. It should be something available to them, but not forced. I don't understand why he's burning time on so many bizarre things. There's plenty of things that could yield dividends with LLMs like optimizing them for speed while retaining serious accuracy, by coming up with new techniques. If he did that, and made a model that was exceptional at programming, he could compete with Claude Code easily, or Codex. Instead, I get the feeling he has no idea what he wants and is just burning funds endlessly. He could have had a cool Meta Verse, but he also could have just bought Second Life and had it prebuilt. Now he technically has the pieces, but not the focus he needs. Bro needs to delegate this fire to someone else before the ship sinks. If I didn't know better, the memes about him being a robot are actually true, and there's a safeguard that sabotages him from making any usable AI as a failsafe to prevent him from building a primitive AI inferior to himself that could kill humanity, plot twist is he doesn't know he's AI.
- HDThoreaun 6mo agoMark runs the company himself for no salary. Does come with a private jet and security though
- giancarlostoro 6mo agoMaybe he should pay himself in order to have some motivation to do better… ;)
- nialv7 6mo agoMark Zuckerberg reminds me of a spoiled child.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6mo ago"Many workers immediately revolted. In online comments, they blasted the tracking as a privacy violation, ..." “How do we opt out?” - Meta employee Poetic justice, or "dogfooding"
- Bombthecat 6mo agoYou can opt out by clicking through those 9 pages, each with a confusing form and buttons. And on the next update we either just enable it again and make you go through the process again :)
- mdavid626 6mo ago...and at the end of the 9 pages you'll be added to the list of employes to let go next time layoff happen.
- zeroonetwothree 6mo agoMost Meta employees do not support invasive features without opt outs in their products. Some try to argue against it. But ultimately there is only person who gets to decide. You might as well blame the entire US population for certain problematic actions of the president.
- reshlo 6mo agoGetting another job when you have Meta on your CV is a lot easier than moving to another country.
- Sh0000reZ 6mo ago[flagged]
- Sh0000reZ 6mo agoWhat? I thought this forum was all about technical correctness. It's technically correct you all have no assurances your assets continue to hold value and you won't end up homeless. Lol Censorship of truth!
- incognito_robot 6mo agoThis will probably get me down voted but I have zero sympathy for anyone who chooses to works for a company built up around the harvesting of personal information. You do have a choice, and by staying you are making it. Stop playing at being a victim.
- sidcool 6mo agoI still cannot fathom how Zuck continues to be the CEO after burning billions into misadventures. The Meta board must really like him.
- reverius42 6mo agoI think he controls a majority of the voting shares, so I guess he gets to be a dictator then.
- kelnos 6mo agoThe board has no choice; while Zuck doesn't have majority economic ownership, he has majority voting rights. If the board fires him, he'll simply fire the board, hire a new board, and have them re-hire him.
- epsteingpt 6mo agoMeta employees as a whole are highly insecure, both from a job security and a 'status' perspective. People jump ship to the latest thing (which was the Metaverse, now is the internal AI lab). There's a massive restructuring going on - layoffs, reorgs - and an even more ruthless performance bar. The internal spying is common across companies. The extent would shock most 'big company' employees. The realization and angst IMO is more that the days of extremely great comp, job security (even if you're good) and career progression is over at Meta unless they figure this pivot out. What will social media become when influencers aren't a thing, and "creators" is no longer a moat. You imagine Mark must be sweating bullets right now, along with the rest of media.
- smrtinsert 6mo agoFrom the third party perspective, it feels like gambling to me. I can't imagine being ok with knowing everything keystroke you make is being tracked to train a model, most likely to replace you. I can't imagine ever wanting to work there, thought that for a long time. "It's full of brilliant people". Well, the profession is quite honestly, there are plenty of places to work.
- epsteingpt 6mo agoThat's changing quickly, and Meta pays extremely well. Not so easy for 3-4 year kids out of school to make $500K-$600K. The supergenius quanty ones go to Jane Street and the smart product-y ones jump ship to OpenAI or Anthropic (e.g. Boris) but there just aren't 20,000 high paying roles out there. Anyone saying otherwise is kidding themselves.
- novosel 6mo agoYou have gotten me in Meta's embrace
- ulfw 6mo agoMeta and miserable go hand in hand.
- Corrado 6mo ago“There are safeguards in place to protect sensitive content, and the data is not used for any other purpose,” I've heard this before in previous corporate jobs and the data ALWAYS ends up being used somewhere else. Usually in job performance reviews or tax documents about new vs maintenance work.
- dzonga 6mo agoyet - Facebook Ads manager dashboard is shit.
- amai 6mo agoIn Germany Meta has a workers council which would immediately veto tracking of employees. In the US you get higher salaries. Make your choice.
- theuniverseson 6mo ago[flagged]
- bamboozled 6mo agoIf I worked for Meta I’d be unhappy by default. Turned down plenty of interviews over the last decade or so and I have friends who are basically “rich” from working there and yet I’m still happy I didn’t join.
- Balgair 6mo agoAdvice: With vibe coding, it's never been easier to inject a ton of noise into this. Think things like TrackMeNot but just in a little notepad or excel or IDE file that you fill up with believable noise all day long. For reference: https://www.trackmenot.io/ https://www.trackmenot.io/
- haizhung 6mo agoWhat’s baffling to me about all this is that Meta/Facebook (like all big tech) seems to be completely insulated from their failures. Take a look at their product line up and tell me one thing that they did really well in the last, IDK, 10 years? And now we also read (and probably have suspected) that their employees are treated terribly too. And yet, they continue to be one of the most „successful“ (as defined by market cap) companies on the planet. How is that possible? This just shows that the current indicators for success/how well a company does/how well the economy does are severely misinterpreted.
- mnmnmn 6mo ago[dead]
- classified 6mo agoGood. It's about time their employees are being made just as miserable as their users.
- zhouquanxi 6mo ago[flagged]