12 ms·

Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

• anukin 3mo ago
  This is the result of scale acquisition. Alexander Wang is a notoriously unscrupulous individual. Meta was in a bad situation post Sandberg era but Wang accelerated the process.
• marsven_422 3mo ago
  [dead]
• _rsg3 3mo ago
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  • jefurii 3mo ago
    The elves are leaving Middle Earth..
  • klipklop 3mo ago
    > my manager has no idea who I am, nor what I’m working on, and I’ve never met them despite me being on the team for nearly two months. This is the fast track to being next in a round of layoffs. If your manager does not know you, they won’t vouch for you when it comes time to toss people out of the airlock. You are in a vulnerable position.
    • deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
    • RobertDeNiro 3mo ago
      At some point the layoff is probably the preferred outcome.
    • klipklop 3mo ago
      Looks like the Facebook employee got scared. They always keep quiet…
      • tsukikage 3mo ago
        The job contracts include clauses about not posting things that paint the employer in a bad light on social media. No idea how enforceable that stuff is in any given jurisdiction, but really, what individual can afford to find out?
• nicechianti 3mo ago
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• simonw 3mo ago
  Anyone at Meta able to confirm or expand on the details in this?
  • deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
• fabian2k 3mo ago
  > 30-50% of engineers on core teams have been forcefully reassigned to data labeling and RLHF, upsetting folks even more. This really doesn't sound believable to me, but who knows with all the craziness going on. Software developers in the US are seriously expensive, using them for data labeling would be a waste of resources. And the percentage sounds very high, unless "core teams" is only a small subset of the total developer count.
  • conradfr 3mo ago
    It's only until Cold Harbor is completed.
    • bickfordb 3mo ago
      Then all the engineers will get to rejoin their outies.
    • panzagl 3mo ago
      I don't know what Cold Harbor means in a Meta context, but its interesting that its named after the battle that exemplified Grant's strategy of attrition during the American Civil War. I suspect it means waves of engineers ground down against the defenses of OpenAI/Anthropic in the hopes of eventually finding a crack. Might be best to get out while you can.
      • georgemcbay 3mo ago
        > I don't know what Cold Harbor means in a Meta context Cold Harbor is a reference to the TV show Severance. Without going into any real spoilers it was the code name of a data classification project so mysterious that the people working on it weren't allowed to know what they were working on (and yes, the project in the show was probably named after the battle in the Civil War). The Meta connection is that there are some humorous parallels between that project and a project involving people tagging data to train technology to replace themselves, and just the overall creepy dystopian vibe of both the fictional and real-world companies (and founders) involved.
• deleted 3mo ago
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• webdood90 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  • jatora 3mo ago
    Ya god forbid people want to have careers at leading tech companies so they can have a more abundant life built by their skillsets and discipline. We cant all work in the forest like you. you realize that the majority of engineering positions at meta in fact arent dealing with the knobs and levers of manipulation? do you have no pity for the coal plant worker who supports his family while working for a company that pollutes the environment? Your shallow morals are disgusting.
    • webdood90 3mo ago
      You can have a fulfilling and rewarding career in tech without working for a monster. The mental gymnastics people do to justify their decisions are hilarious. Just admit you have no morals and love money.
      • jatora 3mo ago
        so meta employees have no morals? lol. gotcha. the world must be very simple to people with black and white thinking.
      • devsda 3mo ago
        This[1] was a beautiful comment and sentiment to preach but difficult to practice I guess ? 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40802676#40804968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40802676#40804968
    • anonymars 3mo ago
      > Ya god forbid people want to have careers at leading tech companies so they can have a more abundant life built by their skillsets and discipline This seems like a fancily dressed up "fuck you, got mine"
      • 3mo ago
• bevekspldnw 3mo ago
  ”I built the Torment Nexus and I’ll got was a few million dollars and this lousy job.”
  • pram 3mo ago
    Sure, the current Torment Nexus buildout might be a bubble. But just think: in 10 years we will already have all this torment infrastructure built, ready to use.
• deleted 3mo ago
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• kadhirvelm 3mo ago
  Man the dichotomy of you have autonomy to now you're a data labeler in a short span of time must be incredibly rough to deal with. How does culture recover after something like that...Anyone have thoughts when this bubble is going to pop? What a bananas time
• peanut-walrus 3mo ago
  Turns out you don't actually need top-tier engineering talent if your only business is selling ads to scammers to prey on the elderly?
  • tennfown 3mo ago
    > if your only business is selling ads to scammers to prey on the elderly? Don’t forget failed, mentally ill, manic rebrands that cost billions and go nowhere. Oh, and enabling human traffickers.
    • solid_fuel 3mo ago
      How now, that’s not fair. They also make a lot of money giving teenagers depression and selling them beauty products and chatbot companions.
      • mxschumacher 3mo ago
        please stop being so mean, they also create echo chambers to kill political discourse (i.e. the foundation of democracy) and show the most inflammatory material to their users to pit them into a shouting match against each other
        • solid_fuel 3mo ago
          Truly who could blame them though. They have to trap people in rage bubbles or they might make slightly less money! I'm so tired of these double standards, nobody ever blames fentanyl manufacturers for making such an addictive product so why is everyone mad at facebook? All they did was poison discourse for a generation and provide material support to an autocrat.
    • fusslo 3mo ago
      the ceo of a former company I was at demanded a rebrand like 6 months after our internal rebrand. Cost ~500k-800k USD. Turned out he was schtupping the vp of the design company (his wife told the admin assistant during the divorce)
• operatingthetan 3mo ago
  >“As per The Information, Meta employees used a total of 60.2 trillion AI tokens (!!) in 30 days. If this was charged at Anthropic’s API prices, it would cost $900M. Of course, Meta is likely purchasing tokens at a discount, but that could still come in at $100M+ – in large part from senseless “tokenmaxxing”.” Holy shit, talking about perverse incentives!
  • kxxx 3mo ago
    That's what happens when you have leaderboards and internal spend rankings/comparisons. This isn't just a Meta thing; many companies are tracking tokens as performance metric but we all know this by now. :D
• vanuatu 3mo ago
  "It’s literally the gulag" - okay this was a funny comment its unclear to me why they need their model to be the best at coding (maybe to build an internal technical moat?)
  • deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  • layer8 3mo ago
    Because coding appears to be the most monetizable use of AI, for some time to come.
    • laweijfmvo 3mo ago
      but who’s going to pay Meta for it?
      • layer8 3mo ago
        ??? The same market that is paying for Codex or Claude Code, if Meta offers competitive services.
        • uejfiweun 3mo ago
          I find it pretty hard to see how Meta could possibly catch up to the existing frontier labs. Distillation, I guess, if you want to go that route, but between the fact that they're already way behind and the constant deluge of negative press like this, it strikes me that they would straight up need an architectural miracle in order to actually be competitive.
    • stephbook 3mo ago
      It's also not like Meta could train it for content moderation, translation or judicial expertise even if it wanted to. They have software engineers idling, not translators.
    • dansquizsoft 3mo ago
• xnx 3mo ago
  Is Meta the same story as Twitter? Two companies with way more highly paid engineers that are needed to maintain a mature social platform and ad network? Funny how both reorgs were done in about the most expensive way imaginable. Twitter through overpriced acquisition, and Facebook through technological adventurism.
  • ceejayoz 3mo ago
    Note that both kneecapped their previously quite open APIs, too.
    • mth1234 3mo ago
      Can’t really win here. If Facebook doesn’t have open APIs, it gets accused of being a walled garden and hoarding data. If it builds those APIs and lets third parties act with the same permissions as the authenticated user that gave permission to that third party, it gets Cambridge Analytica.
      • ceejayoz 3mo ago
        The changes I'm referring to are much later than the CA scandal. In the last few years, they've locked third-party apps out of publishing to Facebook Groups, closed down the bug ticket system, and gave every indication of having abandoned any efforts at improving the ecosystem.
• josefritzishere 3mo ago
  The AI death march is destroying so many companies. You'd think some CEOs would break away from the herd by now.
  • daniban 3mo ago
    I think Tim Cook tried to...
• KaiserPro 3mo ago
  Former meta bellend here: Zuck only cares about features, or new features. He probably likes power too, but I'm less certain than that. To curry favour with Zuck all you need to do is make a new feature, ideally using AI/AR. The problem is, zuckerberg trusts no-one, so he is surrounded by familiar faces that act as his inner court. The problem for meta and the rest of the world, is that most of them are utter brainless dicks. Cox is utterly useless, he has the cognitive faculties of a flea. the rest of the product council has been ruthless bred for agreeing, rather than making good product decisions. Worse still they are either wilfully blind or just blind to the second order effects that their actions take. Boz, in person is nice. Boz as a leader is a vapid, lacks insight fails to provide actual direction and lets his ego bruise too often. He was 2 years to late to NFTs, Regularly picked fights with juniors in the comments. The other elephant in the room is the monetisation department. They are basically the drivers of most of the problems in facebook. Notification fatigue? yeah probably them, AI slop to boomers? deffo Rage bait? yup Fraud? totally profitable. There was a concerted effort by engineers to try and make meta better (see sophie Zhang), however as time moved forward those that cared were diluted by those that were just there. They recruited far too agressivly in 2020. we had too many people then, but "there was a plan" They started firing people in 2022, and never stopped. It was clear that Zuck wanted to be a big man, and doesn't really understand how to run his company (Sandberg is a terrible person, but a good leader, even though shes a monumental hypocrite. He saw her as she is, and assumed thats what the rest of the world saw.)
  • throwarayes 3mo ago
    Also their AI efforts and metaverse efforts flopped So there’s really not a lot of growth areas for them? Their biggest growth seems to have been acquisitions, not new features. Maybe data labeling is like RTO - an intentional way to force attrition.
    • KaiserPro 3mo ago
      > Also their AI efforts and metaverse efforts flopped That's the thing right So I was research so both metaverse and AI adjacent. FAIR was industry leading, just not in the sexy field of LLM. FAIR was passed around like a joint at a student house, finally landing under Cox for "product". But FAIR is a research org, so it was a bad fit, run by an even worse leader. (why can't you deliver a new industry leading LLM in 5 weeks? or some other stupid shit) The metaverse flopped because there was no clear leadership over features/user experience/hardware. Hardware has a 2-4 year lead time. This means that you need to plan your features 5 years in advance. The average horizon for any software feature in oculus was like 4 months. Because of the huge influx of non game/graphics/hardware engineers the same mistake about "oh lets build a x but for oculus" happened every year. When I left they had contracted a company to re-make unity but for horizon. At the same time they were also making a blender clone, but in react or some stupid shitty idea. At no point was there a comprehensive plan for what the UX should be like. there were lots of plans that people made, posted about, got many likes. Lots of redesigns of the button, new social features, avatars etc. Carmak kept on banging on about time to fun, but he never managed to actually make that work. So a social company with a massive social graph, has a product where you can't easily join your friends in a game. (that might of changed, they revoked all my games when I left so I haven't logged in.) But your point right, in all the years threads is the only new product they have launched, and that only happend by accident. Meta's SOP is basically have an idea that gets zuck hard, do a small PoC, it shows promise, scale the team from 10 to 3000, and don't deliver anything. The labelling I don't think is an attrition thing, I think its doing standard facebook shit, throw people at the problem, without thinking about how that would work
• jdalgetty 3mo ago
  They probably just don’t need them anymore. Obviously they are confident that their AI workers are doing a good enough job, and my feeling is that they aren’t planning on creating any groundbreaking new software anytime soon that requires the same number of human engineers to do the work. I think it’s potentially a canary in the coal mine type of warning for the rest of the industry. If a company like Meta doesn’t think it needs the headcount, then other big companies will likely soon follow.
• chvid 3mo ago
  Facebook and Instagram are such strong businesses that they could completely stop development work and the businesses would still be unbeatable monopolies for years to come. But what I don’t understand is how screen recording / keyboard recording is useful AI training data? It seems like a lot cost and a lot of pissing off people for something that is actually not very valuable.
  • pavel_lishin 3mo ago
    One thing I've learned over my career is that engineering seems to matter so little to a business's success. As long as the engineering problems and failures aren't so bad that the salesfolks will get crucified in the town square and convince customers to leave, then seemingly everything can eventually be duct-taped over. Obviously this isn't as true for things where it truly matters - encryption software, financial software, etc. - but it's amazing how little engineering excellent has to do with a company's success.
    • jghn 3mo ago
      As an engineer, this realization was eye opening for me and had a massive impact to my approach. So few of those things that we're trained to approach with care and caution *really* matter at the end of the day. Sure, my engineering sensibilities and professional pride keep me honest to some extent. But the money inflow is what really matters, and engineering quality is just one very small piece of the puzzle for that.
      • oleggromov 3mo ago
        Fully agreed. I'm curious to learn though how your approach changed in particular.
        • jghn 3mo ago
          I mean from a bigger picture view. I'm much more likely to think in broader context of what impact a decision would have to the business at large. And my view of that is much more accurate than it used to be, without the exaggerated sense of importance most people place on their work. In other words, I'm better at right sizing effort and velocity.
• Groxx 3mo ago
  Because it's safe to do so now, anyone on a visa is immediately in an extremely uncomfortable position if they lose their job. They won't leave. And anyone else who does voluntarily gives up on layoff packages. See also Twitter when Ol' Musky rolled in.
  • horns4lyfe 3mo ago
    And that’s why they love visa workers
• jazzpush2 3mo ago
  This sounds bad to say, but it's difficult to feel bad for any meta engineers who lost their jobs. You undoubtedly had other options, yet you chose to work for one of the most well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organizations on the planet. Former employees will deflect and make the comparison to United Fruit workers, despite the obvious difference in employee-optionality and influence. You made your bed. I hope your organization gets destroyed. I hope you reflect on the damage you've caused the world.
  • MAustriaGA 3mo ago
    [dead]
  • throwarayes 3mo ago
    I think it says more about Metas inability to create new products or make investments. Look at their big growth areas. They acquired instagram and WhatsApp. Threads seems successful(?) but is an extension of instagram. Mostly they’ve just gotten better at weaponizing rage bait. Which I’d argue, long term, will be a losing strategy. If this were a healthy culture, with all the people working there, Zuck would have promoted far more interesting internal experiment to full blown products. That just doesn’t seem to happen there.
    • ribosometronome 3mo ago
      >Threads ... rage bait The advertisements within Instagram for Threads almost always seem to be fairly thinly disguised engagement & rage bait. Every time it gets me, I feel an increasing desire to move away from the whole ecosystem.
    • embedding-shape 3mo ago
      > Zuck would have promoted far more interesting internal experiment to full blown products. That just doesn’t seem to happen there I don't understand this either, there are so many clearly advantageous ideas and experiments to be be carried out, that can make discussions better, thinking clearer and help people actually connect. But instead they're only thinking about how to optimize the ad-machine in the end, so depressing to see.
• ironman1478 3mo ago
  Having worked at meta, something I noticed is that the orgs that were well run were ones that were bought. WhatsApp, reality, insta, etc. I worked in an org that was not associated with those products and was purely homegrown and it was awful. Things got done but horribly inefficiently due to over hiring and extreme requirement and schedule shifts. I believe that the cultures that were developed outside of Meta are used to launder the image that meta as a whole has a good engineering culture.
  • newobj 3mo ago
    that may have been true in product orgs but the infra and dev infra orgs were pretty strong imho.
    • ironman1478 3mo ago
      I worked in infra as a firmware engineer and it was something else. Very amateurish
    • aylmao 3mo ago
      +1. IMO the company with the strongest web infra/tooling teams for example. Also very strong teams working on db/data, source control, performance, reliability, pl/compilers, etc.
  • busterarm 3mo ago
    I had a friend who worked for Instagram post-acquisition left and came back to a team in Facebook. They had always sung the praises of Instagram's culture but said they didn't recognize the company that they came back to. Literally night and day between the best and worst place they'd worked.
    • PaulHoule 3mo ago
      Instagram hasn't updated its web application in years -- leaving out the filters which I don't use, unfunded Mastodon has an easier, faster and more reliable interface to upload photos.
• deleted 3mo ago
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• simianwords 3mo ago
  This article doesn’t touch on the single most important aspect: recurring layoffs. I think he’s trying to blame AI for most of it but if we’re to guess, it would be the layoffs. Obviously if the layoffs happen so frequently, the morale goes down. Almost every company is all in on AI so what makes Meta particularly bad?
  • somesortofthing 3mo ago
    layoffs don't explain reassigning half your engineers to work as labelers
• marssaxman 3mo ago
  "If you log into your personal bank account, does the tool track you? What about when you’re writing a personal email, or responding to a personal call?" Why would you ever do such a thing on a device controlled by your employer? I guess there's a whole generation of devs who don't remember the Microsoft antitrust trial, and haven't learned the "anything you do at work may come out in discovery" lesson.
  • ergocoder 3mo ago
    People act surprised when they are tracked on a corporate machine lmao. Do they go to Apple Store and login it to their personal account on the showcase iphone and yell at the genius employees?
    • simoncion 3mo ago
      I remember personally hearing about a Big Tech rank-and-file employee who was trying very, very hard to work around Infosec protections on his company-issued laptop that were preventing him from installing some video game with super-invasive kernel-level anticheat. So, yeah, people do absolutely braindead shit with their company-furnished equipment. It's fucking mind-boggling.
      • ergocoder 3mo ago
        On top of that, the company hasn't never hidden the fact that everything on the machine is tracked. Everyone on the planet is saying this. Every new hire orientation likely states this.
  • michaelt 3mo ago
    > Why would you ever do such a thing on a device controlled by your employer? It is in fact common to do personal things on work PCs. The senior manager spending 5 days visiting that foreign office is logging into his personal netflix account, and video calling his wife and kids. He ain't carrying a second laptop to do it. That middle manager, with a report who needs a widget delivered tomorrow, and purchasing aren't fast enough to get the order in? He's logging into his personal account and paying with his personal card, then making an expense claim. That in-office worker wearing headphones? Good chance he's logged into his personal music streaming account. Maybe he uses youtube music, so he's logged into his entire personal google account too. And the sales guy who's constantly stuck in hotels for business travel? Oh boy you don't want to look his 11pm web browsing.
• drivebyhooting 3mo ago
  Zuck has read one too many sci-fi novels. He is afraid. Afraid that he will be left behind by the AI oligopoly. Afraid that he won’t get to live in Elysium.
  • ryandrake 3mo ago
    I always point out the Elysium parallels and usually get trashed for doing it. But, if you look at all trend lines, the whole world is very quickly bifurcating into a two tier society with the few "Haves" safely walled off and protected from the many "Have Nots." You can see the moderately rich doing whatever they can to maneuver themselves in to position and ensure their ticket to the space station when the split happens. The rest of us are going to end up being economically irrelevant.
  • asdaqopqkq 3mo ago
    in a way, arent we all?
    • drivebyhooting 3mo ago
      No. Not everyone. And even those who are thankfully don’t have the wealth and resources to upheave thousands of lives in pursuit of a mirage.
• jmuguy 3mo ago
  I do think you have to admire how almost comically insane Zuckerberg is to do stuff like this. If Facebook was being run by someone normal what would happen is it would spend the next 20 years pissing away everything slowly as social media advertising became less and less relevant. But not with Zuckerberg at the helm. He will burn that place to the ground trying to find some way to remain important. Its surprising that people working there apparently thought they weren't going to get burned.
  • skizm 3mo ago
    Their advertising revenue grew 33% YoY last earnings call. They're literally making so much money they don't know what to do with it so they plow it into each new fad as to not miss out if this one happens to be a new billion user business. This is in addition to returning capital to shareholders via buybacks and dividends.
    • Herring 3mo ago
      The reason he seems poor is because he keeps signaling he doesn't have enough money to buy the one thing he really wants: trust. These people out for world domination never get it. He can't set up a platform (VR, AI) for the same reason Windows is dying: their brands are toxic and nobody will work with them if they have a choice.
    • fnordpiglet 3mo ago
      To be fair they’re doing it by increasingly immoral, unethical, and potentially illegal methods resulting in at this point over 300 lost lawsuits, regulatory scrutiny world wide, blowback over intentionally enabling scams and fraud for profit, enabling csam, trafficking, etc as long as they pay their ads bills. It’s a matter of time before the regulatory hammer falls on them and they’re hemmed in via civil courts due to damages. Many of the civil suits they’re losing are petty weak cases showing juries and judges literally hate meta. These are signs that their revenues are short term money grabs due to blindly chasing iRev at the cost of literally everything else. Even hacking they only really follow through on if their large business credit extensions are at risk or chargebacks. Debit and direct funding isn’t pursued because they’re not loss liable - if it’s literal theft via debit cards, it’s not a priority. If it’s their own money via credit that’s refundable, they’re all hands on deck. This will all blow back on them at some point and that point isn’t far aware. Courts, governments, banks, they’re all starting to notice the lawlessness and pure avarice. The consequences will severely impair their ads business, require them to undergo worse consent, oversight, and audit that waving an AI hand at won’t be sufficient, especially when the courts are concerned as judges are especially skeptical of AI solutions to court orders. Their only out is to find another business model, which they’ve been trying to do without success since Facebook was first launched.
• billg_unleashed 3mo ago
  [dead]
• start123 3mo ago
  they burned too much cash with Metaverse
• throwarayes 3mo ago
  If you get a FAANG job you need to think like a professional athlete. Save most of what you make. Assume it’s not going to last. Do NOT have an expectation that this is “normal” income. You’ll probably end up destroying your integrity or doing tons of BS work just to do anything to maintain that level of income. Expect the norm to be a startup, non tech company, or some other non FAANG big tech corp.
  • hintymad 3mo ago
    > If you get a FAANG job you need to think like a professional athlete. S This is what Netflix has always been advocating for. Reid Hoffman also wrote the book The Alliance, in which he argues that employees and employers are allies. When they are aligned, they work together. When not, they part ways. I find that these two views are realistic and we can use them to guide our actions.
    • javawizard 3mo ago
      > This is what Netflix has always been advocating for. Reid Hoffman also wrote the book The Alliance I think you might have Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn) mixed up with Reed Hastings (founder of Netflix). :)
      • hintymad 3mo ago
        My bad. I was talking about both. The Netflix culture, and the book written by Hoffman. Hopefully I spelled their names right.
        • javawizard 3mo ago
          Oh! You did. I just saw the two in adjacent sentences and assumed you were referring to the Netflix CEO and had mixed up his name. Nothing to see here, move along...
      • criddell 3mo ago
        I just realized that Netflix’s Reed Hastings is the same Reed Hastings that wrote Purify - the excellent memory leak tool that was a pretty big deal back in the 90’s.
• microflash 3mo ago
  At some point and scale, engineering (and "other" people, really) become a liability than resource. This is where the rot within surfaces through the tainted skin and there's no stopping it. It just gushes and scorches everything—people, goodwill, cultural relevance, and all.
• mikaeluman 3mo ago
  It makes sense that you need the best engineers to do the labelling. But the story very much sounds like a panic move. "Things are going so fast and we need to catch up. Yesterday." But you still have humans working for you. I doubt these label people are putting in their best efforts...
• PaulHoule 3mo ago
  Sad. I thought Meta did a lot of things right when it came to using engineers, especially compared to Google. If I had a choice between React (Facebook) and Kubernetes (Google) I would pick the former anyday. Kubernetes has held back cluster technology for the last decade and prevented a better alternative for smaller companies or companies that can't piss away monopoly profits on unwieldy technology and process. It would have been much better had somebody tried to make an open source product based on IBM's old Parallel Sysplex but there gotta be patents in there (now expired though!) As much as people like to complain, React has come out on top in a highly competitive market. I've looked at a lot of systems for building UI objects which look superficially similar like Microsoft's XAML and Oracle's FXML and React's system is by far the most simple and flexible... An example that shows you can apply the ideas in On Lisp to any language which has basic functional programming practices with just a tiny compiler tweak on top to make it fluent.
  • CobrastanJorji 3mo ago
    Why would you compare React to Kubernetes instead of comparing React to Vue.js?
    • PaulHoule 3mo ago
      Your comparison is like comparing The Eagles to some little local rock band! Rather than two competitive products I think React and Kube are both market dominant products that reveal the engineering culture, values and impact of the two organizations. I can say that when I first started with React I thought it sucked and looked at Vue and Svelte and similar things. My take on all of them was that they made the internal frameworks I was using to build very complex RIAs in the 2005-2010 time frame look like something that fell off a UFO. I first thought Vue reflected the way I thought about conventional "webby" applications particularly in terms of treating lists as a first-class object. I eventually learned with React how to draw absolutely anything, even whole 3-d worlds! https://aframe.io/ https://aframe.io/ I guess what I'll say about Svelte is "if you make such a radical change in your framework did you really believe in it?" Early on I stuck to controlled forms in React because uncontrolled forms seemed structurally unstable (add one too many features and it all breaks) and then I discovered https://react-hook-form.com/ https://react-hook-form.com/ which is easy and very high performing. What I really like about React is not so much the DX or UX but rather the way it uses functions to seemingly transform a language into something else in a conceptually simple way... And how it solves the problem of composing components written by different people and organizations to the extent that we've now got the terrible problem of managing an app that has 50 third party components and 5 CSS management frameworks.
• otekengineering 3mo ago
  because they need to make as many employees quit as quickly as possible if they hope to avoid bankruptcy. i don't think they'll be able to avoid that outcome, instead they'll die trying. maybe their capital and network will be enough to buy them time to fully pivot to hw, though that's probably less of a moat than i believe it is while wearing the rosy glasses of an EE software is now free, at least for the people that know the proper incantations required to manifest it into existence. software-only companies have no future. sending old-world SWEs into the undiscovered country results in high costs to the unprepared SWEs and high costs to their financiers who lose control as soon as the boots on the ground realize the wildfire is too close for comfort and new winds are blowing the only viable way to separate assets from liabilities (payroll) fast enough for large corps to catch up with the growing number of claude-unicorn centaurs, and small herds of them, will be bankruptcy (could be wrong, i'm no lawyer)
  • menloshark 3mo ago
    > because they need to make as many employees quit as quickly as possible if they hope to avoid bankruptcy right now they're freaking out over attrition and making a bunch of posts internally about how they'll "do better"
    • otekengineering 3mo ago
      yes, that is the messaging that meta leadership is going for, you have received it as they intended
• burnte 3mo ago
  When your employer has a vested interest in you using a specific tool above all others, even if it's worse, then success is no longer measured with a rational, objective metric. Once you do not have objective metrics to gauge success, you will always fail in the long, and the long run tends not to be very long. In every single company I've ever worked for or with, I've never seen a "I demand it be done like this" policy ever succeed. I've seen it close businesses, but never succeed.
• cyanydeez 3mo ago
  because enshittification probably has a third rail now with the belief that employees dont matter either.
• uberman 3mo ago
  Why did Meta think that VR was the end all be all before throwing away billions of dollars? Why did that want to pay an AI expert a billion dollars? The reality is Meta chases shiny objects like a cat with little real or accountable leadership.
• csimon80 3mo ago
  In a way, it isn’t that surprising. Executives are constantly being sold the idea that "software is a solved problem." Even if they recognize that this is mostly marketing, it can still influence their internal expectations. They may start thinking, "Maybe AI has solved 30% of software development." From there, the natural executive question becomes: "How do I make as much of my engineering organization as possible fit into that 30%?"
• rimeice 3mo ago
  > raises privacy questions Meta employees being upset about being tracked is the height of irony.
• Danox 3mo ago
  Meta is starting to recognize that they are hopelessly behind the other model makers, and they have been just burning cash over the last three years.
  • lokar 3mo ago
    Past a certain point top talent care more about how they are treated then even more money. The top of the field can get generational wealth at a bunch of different places, why would they put up with Zuck?
• tagyro 3mo ago
  Meta laid off around 2,000 employees this year and in April they announced a further 10% planned cut in their workforce [0]. Employees were told to work from home and were sent emails at 4AM informing them they've been let go. Those that weren't impacted have software on their computer that tracks their every move. Remaining employees can now opt out of being tracked at work for half an hour [1]. Meanwhile, @Meta is raking in record profits. ClickUp reduced headcount by 22% - and the CEO tweeted that the "business is the strongest it's ever been". In the same tweet, the CEO motivated this cut by their intention to build the "100X organization" ...[2] A week before the layoffs, they posted this video [3]. Webflow fired most of its staff, with some finding out about it after more than 24 hours [4] (while being on a locked visa, which means they'll have to leave the country!). Cloudflare laid off 1,100 employees (~20% of its workforce) [5] and hired over 1,000 interns (one could say replaced). My question for anyone still working at these companies: Why are you still working there? [0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/technology/meta-layoffs-ai.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/technology/meta-layoffs-a... [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93x0k194yno https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93x0k194yno [2]: https://x.com/DJ_CURFEW/status/2057522382315929802 https://x.com/DJ_CURFEW/status/2057522382315929802 [3]: https://www.tiktok.com/@clickup/video/7638681657058364702 https://www.tiktok.com/@clickup/video/7638681657058364702 [4]: https://nypost.com/2026/05/28/tech/bloodbath-at-california-tech-startup-as-staff-locked-out-without-warning/ https://nypost.com/2026/05/28/tech/bloodbath-at-california-t... [5]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-for-the-future/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-for-the-future/
  • karel-3d 3mo ago
    It's hard to find a job right now
  • criddell 3mo ago
    > Why are you still working there? Probably for the same reasons you go to work everyday.
    • tagyro 3mo ago
      Definitely not. I work to put food in the table.
• hintymad 3mo ago
  > Amazon has the Kindle I'm not sure how this matters compared to the other platform companies. Kindle has such a small niche market and the Kindle "platform" hardly registers any impact.
  • farmerbb 3mo ago
    Yeah I'm surprised they didn't mention Fire TV or even Alexa in addition to Kindle.
• jimmydonalds 3mo ago
  Honestly outside of the forced reassignment and surveillance this comes across as super whiny. Extremely unsympathetic.
• dzonga 3mo ago
  every engineer is hands-on with 'A.I' - yet we are not seeing quality software out in the wild. no are there bootstrapped / funded startups by Meta alumni hitting the shelve every week.
• throw-the-towel 3mo ago
  I think the gloating in this thread is very misguided. Meta is evil, sure, but that's not the point. The point is that this kind of AI psychosis might be the new normal for our industry, or at least one of the new normals. My last workplace absolutely did a jump in toxicity when the CEO got obsessed with AI, instituted token leaderboards, told us all to drop all non-AI work for a time, etc. We were no Meta.
  • crystal_revenge 3mo ago
    > AI psychosis might be the new normal for our industry I've been fortunate enough to have worked on multiple AI intensive engineering teams (both on the product and research side) where considerable effort was spent reasoning through how AI was changing things and we were consistently evolving our practices. But they've all been orgs with 50 people less. AI psychosis seems to effect very large tech orgs in a different way than small, high impact teams. In small startups, at the end of the day, if the team doesn't ship a quality product, the company fails. Most importantly, every individual still bares the responsibility of their work. Personally, I've seen a lot of thoughtfulness around things like bad PRs because, on good teams, people realize we're all struggling to figure this out. But nonetheless, if something doesn't go well, there's always an individual that needs to figure out how to make it better. Virtually all the things I've learned about functionally shipping products built with and using AI have come from teams like this. Software engineering is changing, but for those of us shipping products, it reminds me a lot of the early webdev days when we were all trying to figure out the patterns to make this new world of software work reliably (anyone who recalls the pre-jQuery JavaScript days will remember how much we had to figure out before webdev could become what is today). In large tech orgs there's a much, much larger disconnect between employee effort and concrete value delivered and similarly much larger diffusion of responsibility. When accountability is abstract and nobody is quite sure what the real value of their work is, then there is fertile ground for AI psychosis to run amok. In part this is because there is a certain latent psychosis in these larger orgs anyway; who's "productive" and what's "valuable" always requires a bit of imaginative story telling, not necessarily grounded in reality. However, I don't think this will persist long as the "new normal". Just like in the rise of web application development, smaller teams will charge ahead and figure some of this stuff out. The MVC pattern applied to webapps, increasingly powerful JavaScript frameworks and best practices, agile practices, git and the popularization of github, the use of No SQL for scaling etc all primarily where battled tested by smaller, high velocity startups and now lay a foundation I'm sure some contemporary devs don't even realize needed to be built by anyone.
• gwbas1c 3mo ago
  Around 2010 I used to point out to Facebook engineers that "Facebook is the new AOL."
  • snapcaster 3mo ago
    what's your point here considering you were wrong? in the last 16 years they've been one of the most profitable companies in the history of the earth
    • gwbas1c 3mo ago
      It's not always about profits, it's about the user experience. In the late 1990s, almost everyone was on AOL and spent a lot of time using it. Now Facebook has a lot less usage.
• gwbas1c 3mo ago
  I think there is a shift here that a lot of people don't recognize. If you worked in TV in the early days, especially when TV was highly experimental and the standards changed every year, you probably did a lot of hands-on engineering or otherwise worked closely with engineers. Today, there is very little engineering in television. I suspect the same thing is happening with social media: The product is mature and will have less and less engineering problems to solve.
  • brokencode 3mo ago
    Which is probably why Meta has been getting into all kinds of side projects like VR/AR and AI lately. Because there just isn’t that much they can think of in the social media space that’d be worth doing. Of course, with how mediocrely those side projects have been going, I’m not surprised Meta is turning to layoffs. They seriously over hired and never really found a good use for all those engineers.
    • datsci_est_2015 3mo ago
      Turns out they have no product vision beyond selling personally-identifiable information to advertisers. I hold them quite a bit in contempt so I would relish in their failure.
  • softwaredoug 3mo ago
    Well probably the whole idea from Meta was to invest these engineers in growth areas. And they haven’t succeeded in that.
  • aurareturn 3mo ago
    Agreed. The article says Meta has 25,000 engineers. How in the world do you need 25k engineers to support Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp? VR is a side business. You can probably do it with 2,500 engineers. Maybe even fewer.
    • zeroonetwothree 3mo ago
      A LOT of those work in VR, AI, etc. Not that many of the 25k work on the core apps.
• LarsDu88 3mo ago
  There's an aspect to this which feels like part of it is that Zuckerberg himself is sliding into middle age. Facebook has been around for 20+ years now. The youthful exuberance of Web 2.0 has given way to the exuberance of an even greater more disruptive AI era. The problem is, it leads to blind imitation. And it's obvious who he's imitating. It's Elon Musk. From Zuck's perspective, all he ever did was figure out how to monetize a PhP web app - something my buddy in high school could create for our M.U.N. club. Zuck spends millions on VR glasses, low income high schools, 100,000 software engineers, and all he has is the same webapp + some monopolistic acquisitions and a loving wife and child. Elon is a total dick to everyone, impregnates his executives, gets high on ketamine, does the Nazi salute on live television, but, importantly, launched more satellites into space than any country on Earth. For less than the price of a shitty VR webapp that 20 people used, Elon will solve Global Warming and bring humans into the outer reaches of the solar system. The duality of man. If Elon started pissing his pants in public or flinging poo at his enemies, Zuckerberg would start doing the same thing.
  • deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  • pixel_popping 3mo ago
    What's wrong with Ketamine? Everybody (or at least population majority I'd bet) have consumed hardcore drugs like Alcohol, Cocaine, Ketamine and so-on, what does it have to do with anything? Haven't you tried?
    • LarsDu88 3mo ago
      No I have not
      • pixel_popping 3mo ago
        You have not tried any hard drugs like Alcohol or softer ones like Marijuana in your lifetime? I mean kuddos to you but I don't really see what's wrong with it in moderation, and shaming people that decide to partake into it is a bit low :)
• warumdarum 3mo ago
  We are going to seem some fairchildren spinouts out of this mess
• hintymad 3mo ago
  > Managers inside Meta “fight” over the pay packets of their employees, which involves “knocking down” the packet of engineers on other teams > Quotas are handed down to managers for the splits of the workforce to be put in each ‘bucket’, and the internal politics gets heated as managers try to get their reports into higher buckets. Curious, why can't the management assigns budgets (or resources in general) to individual teams? That is, it is the managers who are responsible for the resources that their teams get, and the budget is tied to the importance of the "team" that each manager owns. In that way, all the performance review will be local to each team. As a manager, I'd be responsible for the output and importance of my team, and I answer to my manager because they will allocate the budget (or resources in general). Recursively, my team members will answer to me and I don't have to justify who gets rewarded by how much to my peers, except that there will be some form of check and balances. How Meta manages their perf review seems to set up their managers to be ineffective.
  • vkou 3mo ago
    Because that would give managers too much agency. You aren't supposed to get that agency until you are director. Managers manage people and get headcount. Directors manage money and get budgets. That agency has a price, though. Whatever level you get it at, your boss will not give a single crap about any excuses for why you didn't deliver. A meteor could have hit your building, and it wouldn't matter.
• bcatanzaro 3mo ago
  "A founder-engineer driven company. Facebook is one of the few Big Tech firms whose founder is an engineer, and still is the CEO. Netflix is the other one where founder and co-CEO Reed Hastings was also a software engineer before starting the company. Amazon was the other example of this until recently, but it’s not the case at Google or Apple." So funny how people overlook Jensen Huang repeatedly. As if NVIDIA wasn't big tech, or Jensen wasn't a founder, or an engineer...
• wildredkraut 3mo ago
  Well, who cares if they do. I wouldn't miss Meta if they disappear tomorrow.
  • typeofhuman 3mo ago
    Agreed. Of all the major companies, I am actually surprised I use 0 of their products. 0. Apple: yes Google: yes X: yes Samsung: yes Amazon: yes
• AJRF 3mo ago
  I live in $MAJOR_CITY, and Meta is a not a viable workplace for serious engineers anymore. The short term pay for the lunacy of working there is not a sensible trade-off for decent engineers. Aside from having the sword of Damocles over you at all times because Zuck has lost his mind, there is a sense he has had 1 too many failures after Metaverse and they are seriously floundering in AI, and their core products (Ad Manager) has a very poor image, even with non-technical users. So it's not even a sure bet you will even get a short term monetary payoff
  • jatins 3mo ago
    > The short term pay for the lunacy of working there is not a sensible trade-off for decent engineers Besides top 2 AI labs, don't they outpay everyone?
    • dozerly 3mo ago
      Yea, they have to as a tax because no sane person will work there anymore.
  • senordevnyc 3mo ago
    In their defense (haha), virtually all the ad management platforms for social and search are total dogshit. Like seriously, some of the worst software I’ve used. Constantly broken, incredibly poor UI / UX, slow, frequently burns money for no reason, ads just mysteriously stop working, etc, etc. Meta, Google, LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter, they’re all like this. They don’t give a shit about the advertiser experience and it shows. But I put up with it, just like everyone else, because it’s still amazing ROI when you get it working right. And there’s no other choice if you want access to these platforms with billions of potential customers.
• waterTanuki 3mo ago
  > Needless to say, this is invasive and raises privacy questions: If you log into your personal bank account, does the tool track you? What about when you’re writing a personal email, or responding to a personal call? Meta held no consultation and there are no workarounds; just a top-down decision being pushed through. I'm not going to defend Meta's recent practices but any expectation of privacy when using an employer's device is forfeit. I thought this was basic common sense?
• thraway3837 3mo ago
  Um. What's there to engineer at Meta? They are an ad-tech company. I thought the HN crowd would make fun of them for this. For years. But now I guess AI coding is easier to pick on than advertisements? There's nothing at Meta that other companies (engineers) haven't already solved. It's not impossible to load to millions of pictures per second and have them displayed to billions of users. Just the other day, there was a blog post talking about how we should stop idolizing these companies because they're not doing anything groundbreaking or innovating. But now we're doing just that: expecting an ad company to ... do groundbreaking engineering? Say what you will. Zuckerberg for all that we make fun of him is an insanely successful software guy and businessman. Being good at software is easier, but being strong at both is rare, and he's a multi-billionaire from it. The dude is wildly successful and no matter how much we hate on him or his orgs for it, the people love it. And the advertisers love it. People love Meta's products and even folks in AI governance and safety fields get the Meta glasses and actively use them. He's built a company that's pretty much self sustaining and you don't need 1000s of engineers for that. Maybe that fact is hitting too close to home?
  • alex1138 3mo ago
    How about proper account support? Not getting banned while the racist page you report 'doesn't violate community standards'? How about being able to actually see people's posts in the feed?
• sota_pop 3mo ago
  Could it be possible that Zuck has a Llama-shaped magic 8-ball to which he has fully committed himself to “dogfooding” an AI-only strategy to his responsibilities in the company? “[Ll]esus take the wheel”
• spamizbad 3mo ago
  Lots of people blame Zuckerberg, but my own view aligns with the author in that much of this is falls on Alexandr Wang's shoulders (Scale AI's founder). It's perhaps somewhat ironic that the "MEI" guy (Merit, Excellence, Intelligence) was permitted to poach high-performing subject matter experts from key engineering orgs and reassigned them to data labeling - something that, let's be honest, is not where you want to allocate your top performers at an org like Meta. This is one of those things where a (tech) celebrity founder was permitted to blew up a high-performing engineering culture. If shareholders knew the nuances of this they'd demand his ouster. His leadership has been lacking in merit, excellence, and intelligence.
  • lokar 3mo ago
    Zuck hired him and has always been super hands on. He is responsible.
    • spamizbad 3mo ago
      To an extent that's true, but while Zuck might be hands on but he doesn't typically micromanage his lieutenants. Alexandr was clearly in over his head, has never run anything resembling a high quality engineering org, and blew it up in less than a year. I think his days are numbered.
      • lokar 3mo ago
        He does not micromanage, but at the same time he does not tune out. He has to see what’s going on.
        • y2244 3mo ago
          Newspapers have said Zuck has a desk in the meta super intelligence lab
      • jatins 3mo ago
        Yes, but hiring someone with no experience running an AI lab to run your AI lab is a terrible decision for CEO to make in the first place.
• menloshark 3mo ago
  From the inside, there's a crazy amount of attrition right now. The way they handled this layoff freaked a bunch of people out. They didn't acknowledge it for one month and every week we were wondering if it was going to happen. It was a 10% cut but it hit SWE pretty hard, looking at partner teams it was around 15-20%. Another 10% were "drafted" to this bullshit data labeling org. On partner teams, attrition seems to be 10-20% over the last couple months (in addition to prior layoff numbers), maybe higher. Will probably go up again after the next vest. Right now it seems like internal comms has shifted where they're begging people to not leave and saying how they will try to improve things. There have been several reorgs recently. Doesn't seem like anyone knows what the fuck is happening. Teams are significantly smaller than what they were before and it seems like consolidation should be happening, but leadership is in this weird state of paralysis where they're just leaving shit in the current half-reorged state and not doing anything. So tl;dr, right now it's the biggest dumpster fire I've ever seen in my life. Feels like I'm watching the Titanic sink
  • laweijfmvo 3mo ago
    it’s worth paying attention to what the stock price was 4 years ago for the next year or so
• ux4 3mo ago
  Engineering org aside, there's something much larger here burgeoning under the surface: > I talked with several engineers in infra orgs, who had 30-50% of their teams drafted into the ADO org. And in some cases, it was the best engineers who left. > On Tuesday, Meta’s Chief Information and Security Officer (CISO), Guy Rosen, announced his departure. This Guy was here since 2013, after his mobile tracking app Onavo was acquired, VP of Trust & Safety / Integrity during the high-stakes times of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, handling platform abuse and election interference during a very "yuge" election cycle. With that goes the accumulated ethics, philosophy, and tribal knowledge that drives organizational cybersecurity and risk, 3 very important factors that can't be automated away or even openly spoken about. This sounds like a massive change to decision making that is larger than engineering.
  • mwambua 3mo ago
    It's certainly interesting that someone who founded Onavo would be made VP of "Trust & Safety"
• digitaltrees 3mo ago
  Yes. Most companies are.
• mannanj 3mo ago
  He talks about psychosis, and I'm glad to see some people here seeing that for what it is rather than gaslighting everyone and pretending that its a made up word or that that sort of thing is a "conspiracy". I see it more as a part of this common, historical trend among humans and other animals: - core, leadership figures with power, like to push their views and beliefs on others and people will just oddly follow it like in lock step and in tribal hypnosis. - I believe we are seeing this. - I believe we are seeing this from the world's leaders in lockstep, to extract unprecedented resources and take additional power; and protect themselves at the expense of everyone else It seems to me to match similar trends we've had in major periods of instability and revolution throughout human history. WW2, even WW1, showed this by the bourgeoise class. I think enough of them were able to hide and get away with it, and we are seeing a repeat of that by the next generations of their families. Theres my conspiracy theory of the day!
• kens 3mo ago
  On a complete tangent: there's a drawing of an iceberg halfway through the article, the typical vertical shape with 10% above the surface. It turns out that icebergs don't float that way; they rotate until they are mostly horizontal. It's one of those things that once I found out, I see wrong icebergs everywhere. For details, read the article https://axbom.com/iceberg/ https://axbom.com/iceberg/ and try the iceberg simulator https://joshdata.me/iceberger.html https://joshdata.me/iceberger.html or read the tweet that started it https://xcancel.com/GlacialMeg/status/1362557149147058178 https://xcancel.com/GlacialMeg/status/1362557149147058178
• whatever1 3mo ago
  It’s such a waste for a company that has attracted the best talent, to just toss it. Getting the right people on the bus is the most difficult task on the world. And then these people end up in places that cannot utilize their full potential. Everyone is worse off.
• jojobas 3mo ago
  Never stop your enemy from making a mistake.
• aspeckt_112 3mo ago
  I don’t have much to add, but it’s been interesting reading the comments here. I don’t engage with many of their products. I deactivated my Facebook account in 2014, one of the few times in my life I’ve done something before it was “cool” to do so. I do reluctantly use WhatsApp, but that’s really just because literally everyone in my life does so its just easier. However, I recently borrowed a Quest 2, mainly to play Half-Life: Alyx, and once I got over using that fucking awful Windows app to set it all up properly, I’ve been pretty blown away by how good the thing is for the price. Granted, I’m basically just using it to launch into SteamVR, but it’s a solid bit of hardware. Maybe that’s just the result of the work Carmack and his team did there and acquisition of talent after Oculus? Just thought I’d be fair and give a perspective that they seem to have made at least one thing that’s pretty damn good.
• frobisher 3mo ago
  Folks what has Meta got to do with engineering? Their products suck, we all use them because of network effects, nothing else mostly...
• dmujic 3mo ago
  Isn't that really common thing now, just look at Microsoft for example...
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• rgavuliak 3mo ago
  Well paid engineers compare their experience to a labour death camp just confirms how out of touch they are.
  • olsondv 3mo ago
    Felt the same way. Set aside the hyperbole, and it’s coming from the very real fear that data labeling does not have long-term job security. If the company continues to run after you’ve been moved, it’s pretty obvious you were redundant. Tough realization for people that see themselves as having been successful career-wise.
  • Schlagbohrer 3mo ago
    Hyperbole is fun though. So is complaining.
    • rgavuliak 3mo ago
      There's a difference between a hyperbole and being tone deaf.
• a3f8c2d 3mo ago
  If the engineering culture is broken isn’t that an indication that the company is moving faster, breaking things, failing harder, etc? That’s a good thing according to Facebook’s little red book, which, according to the author is an example of good engineering culture. So I’m a little confused.
• MRaid 3mo ago
  I feel that most of the Procedures that they took to push AI are inherently wrong i,e full time data labelling relocation won't be appreciated by anyone why not part time ?? also Measuring token usage is weird. It is true that exectives are so hyped on AI but these procedures are shortsighted and poorely thought of
• mac3n 3mo ago
  "cattle, not pets"
• vladak 3mo ago
  I wonder if the booklet mentioned in the article was also inspired by the Scott McNealy booklet [1]. It would not be so surprising given the history of the Menlo Park campus. [1] https://gist.github.com/vladak/c0abb6856d7902291f760be467b2448a https://gist.github.com/vladak/c0abb6856d7902291f760be467b24...
• Avrio15272 3mo ago
  [dead]