5 ms·

It is hard to judge culture during a period of serial downsizing because it will always be toxic in that context. But what you tell aligns with what I have infe

by zmmmmm 5mo ago

It is hard to judge culture during a period of serial downsizing because it will always be toxic in that context. But what you tell aligns with what I have inferred over a period of many years observing, even during times when they were growing: at a high level, Zuck gives the right signals of a successful tech CEO. He's smart, insightful, talks well (now) and appears decisive and willing to back long term bets into the future. And he makes money like crazy. But looking at the track record there's a very concerning lack of execution around critical strategic objectives. Take metaverse - I know most people laugh at it because they think it was a bad idea to start with. I push that aside and look at the execution. They poured a startling amount of money into it, and the end result - technically - sucks. This is not good execution of a bad idea. This is incompetent execution of an untested idea. After 5 years of huge investment the characters in Horizon Worlds still look like cartoons. All the advertised features of hyper-realistic worlds, generative world building etc failed to materialise. They made a face saving pivot to mobile where they claim it is successful but I literally never heard of anyone using it. I think it will be entirely synthetic traffic driven from their existing properties. Then you can look at AI. You can say the jury is still out on their AI reboot, but it has been out a long time now, and it seems like at best they are just grading into being at par with leading AI labs. But I think that's being generous because so little has been released. What is certain is they went from a leading position right up to 2022-2023 to falling completely off the radar. Despite still holding the undisputed leading AI framework in PyTorch. I have to conclude there's a genuine culture and execution problem that probably centers on the fact that Zuck is simply not a good people manager. And his relationship with the next level down (Andrew Bosworth etc) is such that he doesn't enable them to be either. And this all permeates through to an organization that delivers at a fraction of what it should given the resources it is expending.

marcosdumay 5mo ago
> This is incompetent execution of an untested idea. VR will be huge some day. Maybe not as huge as the Metaverse hype, but huge nonetheless. But did you expect Facebook to have any competence on making it? Even if the timing was correct, what differentiator do they have? And then the CEO throws a world-changing amount of money without even an idea (because "a VR world!" isn't an idea). Did you expect any of that money not to be wasted? That's not how products are made. The Metaverse wasn't an organization failure. It was all Zuckenberg's incompetence, Facebook didn't even get the chance to try. The AI started different, but it's becoming the same thing again.
- somewhatgoated 5mo ago
  VR won’t be huge someday. We won’t live to see it at least. We also won’t experience quantum computing having a real world impact. We also won’t see humanoid robots doing any meaningful real world work. There also won’t be a Mars base in our lifetime or datacenters in space or underwater. There won’t be any flying cars either.
  - johnfn 5mo ago
    I would definitely bet against the humanoid robot thing on good odds.
    - somewhatgoated 5mo ago
      You mean that we’ll have robots that can do the same (more or less) things that humans can? I think the field made great advances in the last decades but still so far away from a meaningful human robot. Personally I also think it doesn’t make sense - we can already produce humans at mich cheaper cost than robots, they grow, repair themselves, can learn all kinds of stuff, etc. I would rather invest in more humans than humanoid robots. Specialised non-humanoid robots are a great idea on the other hand.
  - zmmmmm 5mo ago
    I can't tell how serious you are. But I'm curious - thinking of your past self (depending how old you are), what would have said about the current AI revolution 10 years ago? Eg: the chances that fully agentic generalised automated software engineering would become orthodoxy? What chance would you have given it happening by 2026?
    - rwmj 5mo ago
      We're still waiting for "fully agentic generalised automated software engineering".
    - somewhatgoated 5mo ago
      I’m like 8%5 serious. And you are right I never would have dreamed of some of the things that we have now including LLMs. So it might well be true that I’m very wrong on all of these.
ffsm8 5mo ago
He is the owner though. If zuck wanted, he could solve it. Decimate middle management, downsize at a level of what musk did to Twitter and then _slowly rebuilt_ in order to pay attention to the culture this time, removing anyone that takes part in such behavior... The company would be worth more (because smaller headcount) and likely even ship more, because the culture would be better.. I've never worked at Facebook though, I'm just an armchair analyst being judgemental from reading some comments.
- zmmmmm 5mo ago
  Interesting wording, because he's not the owner. What he owns is enough voting rights that nobody can challenge his decisions. And also interesting in the sense that, this is what he claimed to actually do a few years ago. He had a "year of efficiency" where he significantly flattened and restructured the org, losing tens of thousands of staff. At that time I even defended him precisely due to this reasoning - if execution is failing you need a reboot. Well he did the reboot and it is still failing.
  - ffsm8 5mo ago
    Again, I'm just an armchair analyst, but in that year of efficiency,his aim was to reduce wastage, removing low performers etc. That kind of trimming entrenches previous culture even more, which can be desirable - but not in this particular case where the culture itself is the issue. At that point you can't trim, you need to decimate. The layoffs at that time were several waves of around 10% - unless I misremember? If he instead did two waves with 40% each and slowly rebuilt from scratch, it'd be a different story.
  - kelnos 5mo ago
    > Interesting wording, because he's not the owner. What he owns is enough voting rights that nobody can challenge his decisions. So he's the owner, for the definition that matters for GP's argument.
- bennyelv 5mo ago
  Why is the problem assumed to be middle management? Maybe middle management is the only thing preventing the company going from successful dumpster fire to unsuccessful dumpster fire…
Animats 5mo ago
The low execution quality of Meta's metaverse effort surprised me, too. But they wanted it to run on their relatively weak headgear. A good metaverse needs a decent gamer PC, a serious GPU, and a few hundred megabits per second of Internet bandwidth. (I've written a Second Life client in Rust, so I'm very aware of the system requirements.) Facebook needs to serve a user base which is mostly phones and people with weak PCs. Not Steam users. If you have to squeeze it onto underpowered hardware, you get something like Decentraland or R2 or Horizon - low rez, very limited detail, small contained areas. Roblox has made some progress on this problem, but it took them two decades, even with a lot of money. The real problem with metaverses is that a big, realistic virtual world is a technical achievement, but not particularly fun. It's a world in which you can spend time and meet people, but the world is not a game. It has no plot or agenda. This throws many new Second Life users. They find themselves in a virtual world the size of Los Angeles, with thousands of options, and are totally lost. It's not passive entertainment. As Ted Turner (CNN, TBS, etc.) used to say, "the great thing about television is that it's so passive."
- duskwuff 5mo ago
  I think the problem goes beyond that. Meta never had a particularly coherent story for what "Horizon Worlds" was supposed to be to users - it was variously pitched as an online conference room, a social hangout, a way to explore 3D models, a video game... it felt as if they were throwing ideas at the wall to see what stuck, and nothing really did.
  - Animats 5mo ago
    That's what metaverses are like - big spaces in which users can do things. What to do is largely up to the users.
  - zmmmmm 5mo ago
    Ultimately yes, that was the issue. In theory they built a viable product, even if it still was cartoonish etc. But it was enough to see that even if it was perfected - there simply wasn't a killer app for what to actually do in there. The vast majority of the worlds that got any traction were just kids playgrounds with silly or trivial games. Some of them were quite fun. But none of them represented a serious value proposition to anybody with actual money. The crazy thing is, they built a half decent app called Horizon Workrooms. You could go in there with colleagues and co-work. With so many people WFH it was an actual useful thing to be able to share a room with your colleagues and anybody could throw up a shared screen on the projector, while having your own display in front of you that nobody could see. I did this with folks from my team and it became a regular Friday afternoon type thing for us all to hange out. This was actually useful. But they managed to screw it up and eventually canceled it as well.

by zmmmmm 5mo ago

marcosdumay 5mo ago

> This is incompetent execution of an untested idea. VR will be huge some day. Maybe not as huge as the Metaverse hype, but huge nonetheless. But did you expect Facebook to have any competence on making it? Even if the timing was correct, what differentiator do they have? And then the CEO throws a world-changing amount of money without even an idea (because "a VR world!" isn't an idea). Did you expect any of that money not to be wasted? That's not how products are made. The Metaverse wasn't an organization failure. It was all Zuckenberg's incompetence, Facebook didn't even get the chance to try. The AI started different, but it's becoming the same thing again.

somewhatgoated 5mo ago
VR won’t be huge someday. We won’t live to see it at least. We also won’t experience quantum computing having a real world impact. We also won’t see humanoid robots doing any meaningful real world work. There also won’t be a Mars base in our lifetime or datacenters in space or underwater. There won’t be any flying cars either.
- johnfn 5mo ago
  I would definitely bet against the humanoid robot thing on good odds.
  - somewhatgoated 5mo ago
    You mean that we’ll have robots that can do the same (more or less) things that humans can? I think the field made great advances in the last decades but still so far away from a meaningful human robot. Personally I also think it doesn’t make sense - we can already produce humans at mich cheaper cost than robots, they grow, repair themselves, can learn all kinds of stuff, etc. I would rather invest in more humans than humanoid robots. Specialised non-humanoid robots are a great idea on the other hand.
- zmmmmm 5mo ago
  I can't tell how serious you are. But I'm curious - thinking of your past self (depending how old you are), what would have said about the current AI revolution 10 years ago? Eg: the chances that fully agentic generalised automated software engineering would become orthodoxy? What chance would you have given it happening by 2026?
  - rwmj 5mo ago
    We're still waiting for "fully agentic generalised automated software engineering".
  - somewhatgoated 5mo ago
    I’m like 8%5 serious. And you are right I never would have dreamed of some of the things that we have now including LLMs. So it might well be true that I’m very wrong on all of these.

ffsm8 5mo ago

He is the owner though. If zuck wanted, he could solve it. Decimate middle management, downsize at a level of what musk did to Twitter and then _slowly rebuilt_ in order to pay attention to the culture this time, removing anyone that takes part in such behavior... The company would be worth more (because smaller headcount) and likely even ship more, because the culture would be better.. I've never worked at Facebook though, I'm just an armchair analyst being judgemental from reading some comments.

zmmmmm 5mo ago
Interesting wording, because he's not the owner. What he owns is enough voting rights that nobody can challenge his decisions. And also interesting in the sense that, this is what he claimed to actually do a few years ago. He had a "year of efficiency" where he significantly flattened and restructured the org, losing tens of thousands of staff. At that time I even defended him precisely due to this reasoning - if execution is failing you need a reboot. Well he did the reboot and it is still failing.
- ffsm8 5mo ago
  Again, I'm just an armchair analyst, but in that year of efficiency,his aim was to reduce wastage, removing low performers etc. That kind of trimming entrenches previous culture even more, which can be desirable - but not in this particular case where the culture itself is the issue. At that point you can't trim, you need to decimate. The layoffs at that time were several waves of around 10% - unless I misremember? If he instead did two waves with 40% each and slowly rebuilt from scratch, it'd be a different story.
- kelnos 5mo ago
  > Interesting wording, because he's not the owner. What he owns is enough voting rights that nobody can challenge his decisions. So he's the owner, for the definition that matters for GP's argument.
bennyelv 5mo ago
Why is the problem assumed to be middle management? Maybe middle management is the only thing preventing the company going from successful dumpster fire to unsuccessful dumpster fire…

Animats 5mo ago

The low execution quality of Meta's metaverse effort surprised me, too. But they wanted it to run on their relatively weak headgear. A good metaverse needs a decent gamer PC, a serious GPU, and a few hundred megabits per second of Internet bandwidth. (I've written a Second Life client in Rust, so I'm very aware of the system requirements.) Facebook needs to serve a user base which is mostly phones and people with weak PCs. Not Steam users. If you have to squeeze it onto underpowered hardware, you get something like Decentraland or R2 or Horizon - low rez, very limited detail, small contained areas. Roblox has made some progress on this problem, but it took them two decades, even with a lot of money. The real problem with metaverses is that a big, realistic virtual world is a technical achievement, but not particularly fun. It's a world in which you can spend time and meet people, but the world is not a game. It has no plot or agenda. This throws many new Second Life users. They find themselves in a virtual world the size of Los Angeles, with thousands of options, and are totally lost. It's not passive entertainment. As Ted Turner (CNN, TBS, etc.) used to say, "the great thing about television is that it's so passive."

duskwuff 5mo ago
I think the problem goes beyond that. Meta never had a particularly coherent story for what "Horizon Worlds" was supposed to be to users - it was variously pitched as an online conference room, a social hangout, a way to explore 3D models, a video game... it felt as if they were throwing ideas at the wall to see what stuck, and nothing really did.
- Animats 5mo ago
  That's what metaverses are like - big spaces in which users can do things. What to do is largely up to the users.
- zmmmmm 5mo ago
  Ultimately yes, that was the issue. In theory they built a viable product, even if it still was cartoonish etc. But it was enough to see that even if it was perfected - there simply wasn't a killer app for what to actually do in there. The vast majority of the worlds that got any traction were just kids playgrounds with silly or trivial games. Some of them were quite fun. But none of them represented a serious value proposition to anybody with actual money. The crazy thing is, they built a half decent app called Horizon Workrooms. You could go in there with colleagues and co-work. With so many people WFH it was an actual useful thing to be able to share a room with your colleagues and anybody could throw up a shared screen on the projector, while having your own display in front of you that nobody could see. I did this with folks from my team and it became a regular Friday afternoon type thing for us all to hange out. This was actually useful. But they managed to screw it up and eventually canceled it as well.