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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 s
by gwbas1c 4mo 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 4mo agoWhich 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 4mo agoTurns 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 4mo agoWell probably the whole idea from Meta was to invest these engineers in growth areas. And they haven’t succeeded in that.
- aurareturn 4mo agoAgreed. 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 4mo agoA LOT of those work in VR, AI, etc. Not that many of the 25k work on the core apps.