6 ms·

Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

248 points by ExMachina73 3mo ago

dtj1123 3mo ago
> dimwitted or just evil ...Yes
qsxfthnkp2322 3mo ago
Wang for ceo. Zuck ruined enough lives, let him go become an mma podcaster like he wants.
- ambicapter 3mo ago
  The guy who was going to lead Meta into a glorious AI future?
  - qsxfthnkp2322 3mo ago
    Zuck makes the rules. He’s made enough in his time.
ChrisArchitect 3mo ago
[dupe] More discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48767058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48767058
basisword 3mo ago
Other than the original few years of Facebook has Zuck actually succeeded at anything new? Metaverse was a failure. Instagram and WhatsApp were both bought and Instagram's biggest feature is a straight rip from Snapchat. Occulus was bought. Facebook itself is completely dead among all my peers and even the local business stuff I used to do on it is dead now too. It feels like he just falls from one mistake into another but gets away with it due to the company being a behemoth + his unique control of the company keeping him unaccountable.
- mrits 3mo ago
  Sure, other than being the dominate social media platform for the original few years (2 decades) he is a total failure I guess
  - jordanb 3mo ago
    They maintained the 2 decades dominance by either knifing the baby (vine) or buying (Instagram, whatsapp) every upstart. The moment they couldn't do either they got their clock cleaned (tiktok)
    - radicalbyte 3mo ago
      They benefited greatly from the FTC not doing their job. Google too. Overall it has been extremely damaging to the industry but I suspect that it is the main reason for a small part of California (it not even American exceptionalism, it's Silicon Valley exceptionalism) completely dominating tech.
    - mrits 3mo ago
      Wow, that sounds super easy. Why didn't you do it?
      - Planktonne 3mo ago
        It's a weird assumption that the only thing stopping people from the ad business is the effort involved. Lots of people don't want to sell ads, particularly not with a side of societal harm, even if it would be lucrative. There are other things to value.
        mrits 3mo ago
        I certainly didn't think it was effort
- rafski123 3mo ago
  In Taiwan, Facebook seams like it's part of the Government and it seems that near all the small biz use it to communicate and advertize. Reminds me of the AOL days when people thought that was the Internet.
qarl2 3mo ago
> I can’t tell if Zuckerberg is dimwitted or just evil. I can.
- nathan_compton 3mo ago
  This is definitely a why not both sort of situation. In fact, I think being dimwitted is often associated with being evil, since goodness is (often) just rational self-interest.
  - saidnooneever 3mo ago
    negativity is usually the easy path so evil and dimwittedness go together quite well.
  - nixon_why69 3mo ago
    Zuckerberg got enthroned when he was like 22 and has been primarily interacting with people who want something with him, while not having any wants himself, since then. He's not necessarily dimwitted but it would take an absolutely amazing person to understand the 8 layers below him without having lived any of them. Of course he can't transcend Meta into something beyond what it's become.
    - testdelacc1 3mo ago
      Being fabulously wealthy his whole adult life he doesn’t know what it’s like to struggle to make rent, or have to take your kids out of school and leave the country in 60 days. Those are things that happen to plebs far away and far beneath his concern.
      - narmiouh 3mo ago
        Honestly if a meta employee, esp software dev is having to struggle to make rent or have no emergency savings, its actually on the employee. They are not making burgerking salaries to have to live paycheck to paycheck unless they make poor housing and cars and vacation choices. The visa issue guys should play safe, stick to stabler companies, more reward isnt without more risk I get that whats happening at meta is wrong, but please stay away from these excuses as to why thats wrong, these aren’t for those employees
Ozzie_osman 3mo ago
AI has caused a lot of leaders to overreact. Great leaders find a balance between overreacting and waffling. It's often wise to dampen your response a little bit, without dragging your feet.
- embedding-shape 3mo ago
  [dead]
- testdelacc1 3mo ago
  CEOs are so afraid of being Innovators Dilemma’d that they make rash moves before they have any data.
- 0xpgm 3mo ago
  From what I've read from people with relevant experience, the only way to get a large organization change direction is to issue imperative decrees lacking nuance, because large organization by nature tend to be process heavy and are too incompetent to follow a nuanced direction. If you have tens of thousands of employees the more complicated the communication is, the larger the variation of interpretation of its meaning, I suppose
  - glaslong 3mo ago
    I have a theory of this based mostly in time working in Meta's RL org on VR and Wearables (disclosure).... There's a fundamental comms issue, I think, where you can only broadly communicate the least common denominator of what every involved person will understand. The "imperative decrees lacking nuance." This is doubly hard if the thing is New, so it isn't broadly understood by default in the collective professions of the workforce. For example, we had a HECK of a time getting many web+mobile designers to understand 3D for spatial design like the game designers did. And vise versa, the nuances of building reusable UI and interaction frameworks when maintaining a software platform, for the games folks. It's virtually impossible (no pun intended) to do something both New and Nuanced with a large group of people. You'll spend all the effort trying to get them to mutually understand a shared, nuanced vision on one hand, and constantly scrambling with their different interpretations producing incompatible parts of work, on the other. I think you can ONLY really manage it with small groups, and it's a big part of why startups will continue running circles around big orgs, even with shared talent pool. The only organizational structure that I think mitigates it is having strong top down direction, with vision and expertise at basically every level of the hierarchy. Because it's just taking the small group expert model and delegating it down to expanding levels of detail in execution. Apple seems to be wholly structured around this, and has occasionally done it very well.
vladmk 3mo ago
Seems like a lot of CEOs overestimated the speed of AI, but also it is inevitable.
- goldenarm 3mo ago
  Is AGI really inevitable ? Claiming something is inevitable is a great way to disarm critical thinking.
  - faeyanpiraat 3mo ago
    Well, if progress stops it can be avoided..
    - dylan604 3mo ago
      But that's part of the inevitable isn't it? You'll never get everyone to stop. Someone will always do it because they feel it being inevitable that if they don't do it someone else will so might as well do it.
    - goldenarm 3mo ago
      What is our definition of progress ? We were progressing against world hunger but we decided to shut down efforts against it last year. Is it progress to invest $1T into semi-accurate plagiarism machines trained on stolen data ?
      - overgard 3mo ago
        Sadly, a lot of peoples definition of progress is "number go up". The stock market is booming and yet most people are poorer than they were in the past because those numbers and that "progress" is only in the interest of a very small number of people completely disconnected from the society they live in.
  - basisword 3mo ago
    AGI isn't necessary to completely change things. The change that's occurred in the last 6 months alone is massive. Another couple of big steps like the end of last year and the world is unrecognisable from even a few years ago.
mrweasel 3mo ago
The title is a weird. Ineffective? At doing what? This is an interesting quote from Zuckerberg: > trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected Combine that with the other theories about Meta management in the article, I think we have the answer to is Zuckerberg a "dimwitted or just evil". It's probably the former. He can't plan four month in advance apparently, nor does he want to wait and work of actual data. Meta can affort to implement some AI, wait to see if it pans out and then layoff people. On the other hand, he had way to much patience with the Metaverse, even as all signed pointed to it being a failure. His personal hobbies shows that he is capable of patience, training, hunting isn't going to yield results in four months. I think he lacks the skills to manage, and to recognize and hire competent managers. Had Meta stock not been structured the way it is, I would like to think that the board had replaced Zuckerberg as CEO. I wouldn't however agree that Meta was necessarily to late to AI. They showed a lot of potential early on, but then sort of dropped off. They weren't to late, it is just another mismanaged project.
- rapidaneurism 3mo ago
  If you view AI as a way to downsize and cut payroll expenses without admitting that you must cut payroll expenses because the business is not booming, it makes sense.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
  - mrweasel 3mo ago
    Yeah, you're right, I edited it just now. I rewrote parts of the comment and moved things around and didn't re-read the whole thing.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- stephc_int13 3mo ago
  Zuckerberg was barely adult when he started Facebook. And he probably bumped into a few older guys who thought they knew better than him, and history proved them wrong. He likely developed some irrational belief that clever and young beats anything else, and saw an echo of his own bravado in Alexandr Wang. Turns out his heuristics were not calibrated properly.
tgsovlerkhgsel 3mo ago
I wonder when (if ever) the companies realize that demoralizing your workforce (and destroying that sector of the job market) doesn't have only advantages. I know plenty of people that reacted with the desired fear, putting in long hours to avoid layoffs, willingness to accept lower pay because the job market sucks, etc. - but I think there are also plenty of the the mythical 10x engineers that just checked out, stopped being 10x engineers, and are just collecting their paychecks and waiting for the layoff now. And I'm not sure you can "get them back", ever. At least some companies reacted to this with more top-down management, stricter metrics etc. which kills motivation further and leads to metric optimization. Tell a good, smart, motivated engineer that you want more AI usage, and he's going to maybe start using some AI where it makes sense, but mostly ignore the metric while trying to do useful work. Demotivate the same engineer and make clear that his paycheck depends on metrics, and he'll give you what you're asking for, except https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn is probably not what you _wanted_...
- fridder 3mo ago
  Exactly. With the broad layoffs some companies do, you learn the company doesn’t value you, so why should you value the company?
  - kermatt 3mo ago
    You should not. Jobs are ephemeral, as companies consider employees to be replaceable / expendable cogs in the machine. Keeping expectations equal makes sure all parties benefit. Companies base their decisions on revenue and cost, employees should as well. Any past illusions that loyalty to a company has personal beneift are long since dispelled.
- overgard 3mo ago
  Yeah, working harder to avoid a layoff in a big company doesn't really work out - by the time you know about the layoffs they've probably already made their decisions about who stays and goes anyway. Plus that higher rate of effort might be unsustainable and you end up leaving on your own accord anyway or burning out. Layoffs somewhat change the employment arrangement too for the people that stay: "we pay you the same but now you're expected to do the work of the missing people"
GodelNumbering 3mo ago
Very shallow wrapper around the reuters piece (https://www.reuters.com/business/zuckerberg-says-ai-agent-development-going-slower-than-expected-2026-07-02/ https://www.reuters.com/business/zuckerberg-says-ai-agent-de... ), I dont think author adds any tangible value
- laweijfmvo 3mo ago
  in fact i’d say it’s a rather poor wrapper and sensationalizes far beyond what reuters actually reported. e.g. the unsupported claim that Zuckerberg somehow put Alex Wang “in charge of the entire company.”
  - EshuMarneedi 3mo ago
    I literally supported the claim by linking to this reporting, which effectively says the same thing. (And yes, I did make an HN account for this.) https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/why-is-meta-destroying-its-engineering https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/why-is-meta-destr...
- Esophagus4 3mo ago
  Thank you for the original. Given that, the pattern I saw in my head was that Zuck sees a new toy, get excited and thinks it will change everything, invests in it, then admit he’s wrong, but at least we have an ads business to keep this whole thing rolling along. Rinse and repeat. Reminds me a lot of crypto payments, metaverse / VR / AR. A man trying to predict the future and being mostly incorrect while not really facing any consequences of being wrong. Always searching for the next big thing. Classic Silicon Valley tale.
glimshe 3mo ago
This is another piece of evidence against the "Zuckerberg Exceptionalism" theory. I've argued before that he is neither a great leader nor a particularly intelligent person outside some alleged Math talent. He was, at best, a competent entrepreneur and very hard worker who was in the right place at the right time. Meta's strategy is the kind of thing many/most people here could have come up with: * "We have lots of users, let's show them more ads" * "They are doing AI, let's do AI". * "I've watched Ready Player One, let's build VR". Duh.
- 4fffsa 3mo ago
  math talent is over-rated. I know many math talented guys - olympiad level. What are they doing 30 yrs on? nothing special. The unfortunate truth for many is (and the lie they got told) - none of that stuff has any relevance to large contributions in the economy.
fullshark 3mo ago
That quote doesn't support the headline
paxys 3mo ago
Meta is in a weird place because Zuck is at this point very far removed from day to day company operations and its overall culture, but still wants to be the one calling all the shots. Plus just like Musk and others he has megalomania and wants to rule the world. And considering his hold of the company no one can really argue with him. You can pretty much see his thought process in real time. "Google and OpenAI have built these cool LLM things, but I have the best engineers in the world so obviously I should be driving that technology. Go build it for me." Turns out his engineers aren't very effective at building it. "Obviously I need to fire all these lazy employees and replace them with the best industry talent. They aren't going to refuse my money." So he throws billions at a few top AI researchers, but they produce nothing of value. "I don't understand, why am I still not winning? It must be because the AI industry itself is now moving at a very slow pace.
- red_admiral 3mo ago
  It's probably chance, but this post is at the top of HN right next to https://weli.dev/blog/half-baked-product/ https://weli.dev/blog/half-baked-product/. Seems like you don't need to be a young startup founder to get your dough in a twist.
- zurfer 3mo ago
  > So he throws billions at a few top AI researchers, but they produce nothing of value. so he spends 1% of yearly revenue on AI talent to catch up? we can't judge if they have produced nothing of value, no? They don't owe the world to open source their work? Meta has plenty of failings, but taking risks and investing optimistically is not on my list. I guess the sentiment here on HN is probably biased by the addictive nature of its products.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- sharts 3mo ago
  The guy is out of touch with society.
meerita 3mo ago
Maybe the best solution is not to fire good engineers and replace them with AI, but to remove the useless "vibe" managers who are basically the bottleneck for everything.
KaiserPro 3mo ago
> I can’t tell if Zuckerberg is dimwitted or just evil. The problem during the first era of the AI boom (circa 2023) was indeed that Meta was too slow to identify the metaverse flub. Former meta wanker here. Its both. but also its the structure around Zuckerberg that makes it worse. First Zuckerberg only cares about tech, he doesn't care about product. he loves research, and he loves new things that can be done with the research that he's been sponsoring. People management, politics, product design is all stuff that is outsourced. Now, rightly, Zuckerberg has trust issues. Everyone either tells him he's brilliant or a massive cunt. there is no inbetween. This means he has an inner circle that manages his action flow and diffuses it into the organisiation. This is problematic because they are not there because of competence, virtually all of them are there because they have been at facebook for a long time. Its network not competence. Facebook used to (it was less before I left) bang on about this being "your company" as in it was a town hall of ideas, and the best would bubble up to the top, the rest would dissolve into the primal talent pool. This means that the company "product team" were setup and still to some extent to be information brokers, they would pull the best initiatives and show them selectively to Zuck. They didnt really provide strong vision about what the "facebook" product should be. Combine that with the 6month PSC cycle, where you have to demonstrate "impact", means you have lots of half baked single ideas that bubble up, get tested and then either kinda fizzle out or stay there like a fucking cancer. These ideas are driven by metrics of a sub department of a sub department of a sub department. At one point the notifications on the facebook app were owned by more than one team, possibly three, with a overall family of app notification team(I get hazy on this, whatever it was there were many many people who's job was to move images around on the notification panel by minute amounts and work out if that drove screen time) This means that direction is hard, mainly because there is none from the centre, and that the company flow isn't designed for a single design to be implemented globally. There isn't enough glory to go around to feed the senior ++ staff engineers who get paid $3m a year to specialise is tweaking the colour of the border of buttons in the facebook app by 3%. Boz bills himself as the "moderator" and "unblocker" not the arbiter of taste, or the "facebook style". I don't think Cox has publicly ever uttered any words of substance. the point is, none of them have said "here is the experience design that we want, go and make this work so that it looks and feels like this". Its all "ok this feature moved MAU by .0005% lets ship that one" There is one exception to all of that: monetization. If monetization want to change something for whatever reason, then they get it. Gambling adverts in your notifications? sure, creating an audience group for tweens that have just deleted a selfie? fuckyeah Hiding fraud from the outside world? sure is 10% of global revenue enough? TLDR: Zuck is politically naive, and consistently fails to learn. He is reliant of his inner circle to spoon feed him decisions outside his competency areas
LogicFailsMe 3mo ago
"I can’t tell if Zuckerberg is dimwitted or just evil." I'll go with both... I think the guy made some real moves early on, but it's been a while since whatsapp and instagram. And since then, if the tales in Careless People are to be believed, so much smoke has been blown up his digestive endpoint that he's mostly smoke now.
- fridder 3mo ago
  His most innovative move was acquisition
  - watwut 3mo ago
    The word innovative does n9t mean anything anymore. It became synonym with "earns a lot of money". People who innovate without becomming super rich dont get ackwnowledged as innovative. CEO buys or copy an app - innovative.
    - LogicFailsMe 3mo ago
      As someone who made advances in two mostly independent fields (arguably 3), 100%! But also, while I'm not mega rich, I'm very comfortable, if only to keep me from stirring the pot some more with my troublemaking nature. This is where Tom Lehrer's advice that selling out is OK if you get a good price comes into play. And yes, satire, but surprisingly good career advice in the real world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yz-Aed356kA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yz-Aed356kA
  - josefresco 3mo ago
    Buying a competitor to which you are losing in an emerging market is not innovative it's the opposite statement: We lack innovation internally and need to look outside the company.
  - alok-g 3mo ago
    And now we have Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Account Manager that links the usernames, features to post Instagram posts to Facebook also and vice versa, people sharing links to their Instagram/Facebook posts via WhatsApp statuses, ... what a mess.
overgard 3mo ago
I'm kind of curious, whatever happened to Zuckerberg's AI clone? I haven't heard about it recently but it was one of the uh, more interesting AI stories.
croes 3mo ago
> I can’t tell if Zuckerberg is dimwitted or just evil. Evil > Zuckerberg's increasingly bizarre war on whistleblowers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48698684 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48698684
eagerpace 3mo ago
Everyone I have seen in a corporate environment is using it to do their existing work faster. The rest of the organization has not yet evolved to take advantage of these new tools.
Planktonne 3mo ago
At some point, after repeated rounds of ineffective hire-and-fire cycles, it becomes impossible to avoid admitting that the problem is the management.
- burnt-resistor 3mo ago
  The root cause is workers not unionizing and forming worker-owned co-ops rather than depending on the whims of idiot-jerks running corporations.
ilamont 3mo ago
In retrospect, he said, the “trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected,” and that the company’s bets on the new structure “haven’t come to fruition yet.” Zuckerberg was referring to AI agents, automated systems that can execute tasks on behalf of a user. Conversations he was having “with our top people” when they started planning the restructuring in January and February “were that they were worried that we weren’t going to move fast enough to adapt,” Zuckerberg said. If Zuckerberg is seeing problems, that means other large tech firms that also followed the siren call of AI transformation and opted to quickly shake things up are likely feeling similar pains. For instance, Andy Jassy spouted very similar language in his 2025 letter to Amazon shareholders (https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-ceo-andy-jassy-2025-letter-to-shareholders https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-ceo-and...) which was followed by layoffs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46748603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46748603). What have we seen since? Lots of stuff breaking, from seller-focused tech (https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions?sortBy=relevance&dateRange=pastYear&replies=repliesAll&contentType=ALL&searchTerm=attribute https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions?s...) to cloud services. Amazon now mandates senior engineers to sign off on AI-generated code (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47323017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47323017), even though that will interfere with the mandate to "move fast and operate the like the world's biggest startup."
- ozgrakkurt 3mo ago
  > Amazon now mandates senior engineers to sign off on AI-generated code This will never work because then you are expecting the more experienced people to be reviewing endless slop coming from less experienced people. They will either do a bad job to comply or just quit
  - andrekandre 3mo ago
    > reviewing endless slop coming from less experienced people oh, thats easy to handle; just have another ai review the slop for you. see how easy that was? PRODUCTIVITY UNLOCKED. /s (just in case)
migueldeicaza 3mo ago
Lives were destroyed, families were in turmoil, but look at the bright side: it was a learning moment.
jqpabc123 3mo ago
company’s bets on the new structure “haven’t come to fruition yet. It's metaverse deja vu.
sneak 3mo ago
Has Zuckerberg ever deliberately invented a successful product using skill and taste? His original moneymaker was sort of happenstance, a right-place-right-time quick hack that lucked out, got traction, and raised enough money to scale out, BIG, with essentially the same concept that he lucked upon. Instagram and WhatsApp, both absolutely successful beyond imagination, were acquisitions. Same goes for Oculus. Has Zuckerberg/Meta ever once themselves deliberately sat down and invented and built something great masses of people want? Facebook doesn't count; that was happenstance. He didn't hack that together in a day to get a billion users, or perhaps even to build a "product" at all. They tried doing hardware with that Echo Show knockoff, afaik nobody really bought it. They tried the metaverse thing, and, again, nobody really wanted it. (I'm still not convinced it doesn't have legs; the way they did it was obviously not it.) React and zstd don't count, obviously.
- abroszka33 3mo ago
  No, but did any of the other big companies? Google literally found the transformer architecture but had no idea what to do with it.
  - xboxnolifes 3mo ago
    Google.com, Chrome, and Gmail we all very tasteful products. Gmail won more on storage space, but each of the products were distinctly fairly clean design for their time.
    - paradox460 3mo ago
      Google maps basically reinvented how people think about Internet maps
      - abroszka33 3mo ago
        Yes, and Google purchased the technology, did not invent it.
detourdog 3mo ago
Not impressed with the quote from Zuckerberg. I see it as a very shallow analysis. I think the stated goal of Agentic development is too amorphous to know what might work. I assume they thought there were too many voices in the development so they had layoffs only to find that wasn't the issue. Why would layoffs make work happen faster.
bwfan123 3mo ago
The bigger story here is that the AI agents were not effective. This is a huge admission and explains why Anthropic, OpenAI, and now Microsoft are creating giant teams of FDEs (forward deployed engineers). It ties in with Meta becoming a GPU cloud to sell "excess AI compute". xai and now meta renting excess AI compute and shovel-vendors are trying to keep the embers alive with free tokens in a last-ditch effort.
meindnoch 3mo ago
Layoffs will continue until morale improves.
jmyeet 3mo ago
All of these tech companies have fallen into the Wall Street trap and it will be their ultimate undoing. Meta probably more than most. I feel like a broken record but Google cracked this particular nut in the 2000s by creating an environment where people could flourish who would otherwise suffer in Corporate America. Google studied this and found in the 2010s that psychological safety was the number one factor in team success [1]. Corporate America typically has what's called an "up or out" mentality. Jack Welch dogmatic thinking rules here. Fire the bottom 5% every year and if you don't get promoted within a certain period, get rid of you because you've reached your potential. This is what created things like stack ranking (which is nothing more than a popularity contest) and smoothing of performance ratings. The last one is toxic because a certain percentage of ratings have to be subpar (ie below "Meets Expectations"). All of this destroys collaboration and creates an environment where those who are more political and more likable rise to the top. And guess what? Your autistic engineers who otherwise flourished in early Google can't function effectively in such an environment. And these are the people who otherwise become subject-matter experts in storage systems, networking and other niche topics. At some point innovation ends and the only way to satisfy the insatiable appetite for increasing profits is to raise prices and/or cut costs. So all these companies have engaged in the suppression of wages despite being wildly profitable on a per-employee basis. As for Zuckerberg in particular, he clearly has no idea where to go with Meta and the AI division is a disaster. The posterchild for bad decision-making and leadership was the Metaverse because $70B+ was spent on an idea with no product-market fit. There were other less expensive boondoggles (eg Libra). So Zuck hired like crazy in the pandemic because that's what everyone else did and has now engaged in massive layoffs because, well, that's what everyone else is doing and he has no idea what to do with those people. Notice how it's leadership errors that are massively disruptive to people's lives but they suffer none of the consequences when they're responsible? Yeah, me too. [1]: https://psychsafety.com/googles-project-aristotle/ https://psychsafety.com/googles-project-aristotle/
- andrekandre 3mo ago
  > Corporate America typically has what's called an "up or out" mentality. Jack Welch dogmatic thinking rules here. and it has spread all over the world, damaging quality and trustworthiness everywhere it spreads > Notice how it's leadership errors that are massively disruptive to people's lives but they suffer none of the consequences when they're responsible? i think this is what people nowadays call "freedom and meritocracy" (only slightly sarcastic here)
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
flowerthoughts 3mo ago
Fire first, ask questions later.
sometimelurker 3mo ago
I'm gunna say something crazy sounding that might be insensitive but is really obviously true to anyone that thinks about it for a few seconds. Meta throwing away a ton of really good talent is probably better for the world by a large degree. It is better if less very smart people work for them. We do not need more tracking algo's and unsafe uninterpretable AI (search 'meta coconut latent reasoning paper') made by a company that's fine with using the information of when teen girls delete selfies to sell them ads for beauty products. We don't.
- 4fffsa 3mo ago
  This is gonna sound evil but idc. If I hire ex-Meta guys its for one reason only: squeeze them dry to repent their sins. Literally squeeze, squeeze... and squeeze and til they quit. Personally I wish others would do it too. Working there is a choice.
  - sometimelurker 3mo ago
    ok, that is evil because this would inflict pain on people to no overall benefit. this is equivalent to saying "prisons should torture the worst criminals", which would be insane > Working there is a choice look into non-competition clauses, there's a real chance its not. also people who work there are not somehow vastly less moral than those that work at Google ect
    - 4fffsa 3mo ago
      as below - dont care
  - braebo 3mo ago
    Two wrongs don’t make a right my friend.
    - 4fffsa 3mo ago
      dont care
sharts 3mo ago
Smartest folks in the room. Greatest capital allocators we have. Maybe that’s what happens when systems not only permit but encourage and reward failing upwards.
taffydavid 3mo ago
Zuckerbergs ineffectiveness was evident long before the examples mentioned in this article. He failed to counter the rise of Twitter, failed to combat misinformation during elections, directly contributing to the result of the brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump in 2016
phillipcarter 3mo ago
Missing in here is the nuance that Meta was absolutely not too late to the first AI boom with Llama, and at one point were the clear leaders of the OSS alternative LLM space. But they blew it up themselves with the disastrous Llama 4 release which included, amongst immense self-imposed delays, lies on benchmarks. No wonder nobody wants to use their tech.
hn_throwaway_99 3mo ago
This article is classic 20/20 hindsight that you always see when a business decision doesn't pan out. From the author: > The self-created tragedy of Meta is that the company is loath to invent new products. Instead, Meta’s management more or less relies on “vibes” to govern its decisions, and those vibes are often either wrong or far too late. The most pertinent example of the former is the ill-fated metaverse, which was developed solely on the (unbelievable) whim that the pandemic would last forever — or at least far longer than it actually did — and people would become accustomed to replacing in-person interaction with virtual reality. It was precisely at this moment, roughly around mid-2020, that Meta (then Facebook) disintegrated from a social media company into a Ship of Theseus that still technically operated its core social platforms but fundamentally was distracted by a red herring. Vibes-based management. This is bullshit. All businesses need to take calculated risks, which sometimes don't pan out. The reason Zuck went full bore into VR/AR is because he desperately understood (correctly, IMO) that not owning a major computing platform was a huge risk. Microsoft had Windows on the desktop, Apple and Google had iOS and Android on mobile. When iOS restricted advertiser tracking (requiring opt in, which nearly every same person thought was a good thing) it cost Facebook a ton of money. So Zuckerberg made a big bet that VR/AR would be the next big computing platform. Except the bet flopped. Turned out very few people want a big pair of goggles strapped to their face all day. But Facebook wasn't alone in making a bad bet - Apple spent billions on Vision Pro, and that's basically dead. The problem isn't that Facebook made a big bet that flopped, and that alone isn't "vibes management". The problem is that since Zuck has majority voting power, basically all decisions come down to him and nothing is tempered by the expectations/desires of others, so you get this "pendulum" management as I call it. Sometimes you have these visionary leaders and it works out, but a lot of times it crashes over time. Musk runs his companies largely the same way, and while obviously it has worked out well for his companies and shareholders, it's widely known now that employees at his companies see a primary task as "managing Musk". Tesla's self-driving capabilities are far behind Waymo despite having a lot more driving data, and a big issue is Musk's insistance on cameras only. I've seen comments here on HN that any self-respecting AI leader would never work for X AI because the marching orders are basically "grok has to say what Musk wants". Having an "emperor CEO" means the company can move quickly, but that goes for both beneficial and detrimental directions.
xinan 3mo ago
It’s interesting to see how all these big techs are going from “hiring with best with attractive comp package” directly to “saving the most by replacing employees with something that sometimes does the right thing”.
queenkjuul 3mo ago
> I can’t tell if Zuckerberg is dimwitted or just evil He's always clearly been both

248 points by ExMachina73 3mo ago

dtj1123 3mo ago

> dimwitted or just evil ...Yes

qsxfthnkp2322 3mo ago

Wang for ceo. Zuck ruined enough lives, let him go become an mma podcaster like he wants.

ambicapter 3mo ago
The guy who was going to lead Meta into a glorious AI future?
- qsxfthnkp2322 3mo ago
  Zuck makes the rules. He’s made enough in his time.

ChrisArchitect 3mo ago

[dupe] More discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48767058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48767058

basisword 3mo ago

Other than the original few years of Facebook has Zuck actually succeeded at anything new? Metaverse was a failure. Instagram and WhatsApp were both bought and Instagram's biggest feature is a straight rip from Snapchat. Occulus was bought. Facebook itself is completely dead among all my peers and even the local business stuff I used to do on it is dead now too. It feels like he just falls from one mistake into another but gets away with it due to the company being a behemoth + his unique control of the company keeping him unaccountable.

mrits 3mo ago
Sure, other than being the dominate social media platform for the original few years (2 decades) he is a total failure I guess
- jordanb 3mo ago
  They maintained the 2 decades dominance by either knifing the baby (vine) or buying (Instagram, whatsapp) every upstart. The moment they couldn't do either they got their clock cleaned (tiktok)
  - radicalbyte 3mo ago
    They benefited greatly from the FTC not doing their job. Google too. Overall it has been extremely damaging to the industry but I suspect that it is the main reason for a small part of California (it not even American exceptionalism, it's Silicon Valley exceptionalism) completely dominating tech.
  - mrits 3mo ago
    Wow, that sounds super easy. Why didn't you do it?
    - Planktonne 3mo ago
      It's a weird assumption that the only thing stopping people from the ad business is the effort involved. Lots of people don't want to sell ads, particularly not with a side of societal harm, even if it would be lucrative. There are other things to value.
      - mrits 3mo ago
        I certainly didn't think it was effort
rafski123 3mo ago
In Taiwan, Facebook seams like it's part of the Government and it seems that near all the small biz use it to communicate and advertize. Reminds me of the AOL days when people thought that was the Internet.

qarl2 3mo ago

> I can’t tell if Zuckerberg is dimwitted or just evil. I can.

nathan_compton 3mo ago
This is definitely a why not both sort of situation. In fact, I think being dimwitted is often associated with being evil, since goodness is (often) just rational self-interest.
- saidnooneever 3mo ago
  negativity is usually the easy path so evil and dimwittedness go together quite well.
- nixon_why69 3mo ago
  Zuckerberg got enthroned when he was like 22 and has been primarily interacting with people who want something with him, while not having any wants himself, since then. He's not necessarily dimwitted but it would take an absolutely amazing person to understand the 8 layers below him without having lived any of them. Of course he can't transcend Meta into something beyond what it's become.
  - testdelacc1 3mo ago
    Being fabulously wealthy his whole adult life he doesn’t know what it’s like to struggle to make rent, or have to take your kids out of school and leave the country in 60 days. Those are things that happen to plebs far away and far beneath his concern.
    - narmiouh 3mo ago
      Honestly if a meta employee, esp software dev is having to struggle to make rent or have no emergency savings, its actually on the employee. They are not making burgerking salaries to have to live paycheck to paycheck unless they make poor housing and cars and vacation choices. The visa issue guys should play safe, stick to stabler companies, more reward isnt without more risk I get that whats happening at meta is wrong, but please stay away from these excuses as to why thats wrong, these aren’t for those employees

Ozzie_osman 3mo ago

AI has caused a lot of leaders to overreact. Great leaders find a balance between overreacting and waffling. It's often wise to dampen your response a little bit, without dragging your feet.

embedding-shape 3mo ago
[dead]
testdelacc1 3mo ago
CEOs are so afraid of being Innovators Dilemma’d that they make rash moves before they have any data.
0xpgm 3mo ago
From what I've read from people with relevant experience, the only way to get a large organization change direction is to issue imperative decrees lacking nuance, because large organization by nature tend to be process heavy and are too incompetent to follow a nuanced direction. If you have tens of thousands of employees the more complicated the communication is, the larger the variation of interpretation of its meaning, I suppose
- glaslong 3mo ago
  I have a theory of this based mostly in time working in Meta's RL org on VR and Wearables (disclosure).... There's a fundamental comms issue, I think, where you can only broadly communicate the least common denominator of what every involved person will understand. The "imperative decrees lacking nuance." This is doubly hard if the thing is New, so it isn't broadly understood by default in the collective professions of the workforce. For example, we had a HECK of a time getting many web+mobile designers to understand 3D for spatial design like the game designers did. And vise versa, the nuances of building reusable UI and interaction frameworks when maintaining a software platform, for the games folks. It's virtually impossible (no pun intended) to do something both New and Nuanced with a large group of people. You'll spend all the effort trying to get them to mutually understand a shared, nuanced vision on one hand, and constantly scrambling with their different interpretations producing incompatible parts of work, on the other. I think you can ONLY really manage it with small groups, and it's a big part of why startups will continue running circles around big orgs, even with shared talent pool. The only organizational structure that I think mitigates it is having strong top down direction, with vision and expertise at basically every level of the hierarchy. Because it's just taking the small group expert model and delegating it down to expanding levels of detail in execution. Apple seems to be wholly structured around this, and has occasionally done it very well.

vladmk 3mo ago

Seems like a lot of CEOs overestimated the speed of AI, but also it is inevitable.

goldenarm 3mo ago
Is AGI really inevitable ? Claiming something is inevitable is a great way to disarm critical thinking.
- faeyanpiraat 3mo ago
  Well, if progress stops it can be avoided..
  - dylan604 3mo ago
    But that's part of the inevitable isn't it? You'll never get everyone to stop. Someone will always do it because they feel it being inevitable that if they don't do it someone else will so might as well do it.
  - goldenarm 3mo ago
    What is our definition of progress ? We were progressing against world hunger but we decided to shut down efforts against it last year. Is it progress to invest $1T into semi-accurate plagiarism machines trained on stolen data ?
    - overgard 3mo ago
      Sadly, a lot of peoples definition of progress is "number go up". The stock market is booming and yet most people are poorer than they were in the past because those numbers and that "progress" is only in the interest of a very small number of people completely disconnected from the society they live in.
- basisword 3mo ago
  AGI isn't necessary to completely change things. The change that's occurred in the last 6 months alone is massive. Another couple of big steps like the end of last year and the world is unrecognisable from even a few years ago.

mrweasel 3mo ago

The title is a weird. Ineffective? At doing what? This is an interesting quote from Zuckerberg: > trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected Combine that with the other theories about Meta management in the article, I think we have the answer to is Zuckerberg a "dimwitted or just evil". It's probably the former. He can't plan four month in advance apparently, nor does he want to wait and work of actual data. Meta can affort to implement some AI, wait to see if it pans out and then layoff people. On the other hand, he had way to much patience with the Metaverse, even as all signed pointed to it being a failure. His personal hobbies shows that he is capable of patience, training, hunting isn't going to yield results in four months. I think he lacks the skills to manage, and to recognize and hire competent managers. Had Meta stock not been structured the way it is, I would like to think that the board had replaced Zuckerberg as CEO. I wouldn't however agree that Meta was necessarily to late to AI. They showed a lot of potential early on, but then sort of dropped off. They weren't to late, it is just another mismanaged project.

rapidaneurism 3mo ago
If you view AI as a way to downsize and cut payroll expenses without admitting that you must cut payroll expenses because the business is not booming, it makes sense.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
- mrweasel 3mo ago
  Yeah, you're right, I edited it just now. I rewrote parts of the comment and moved things around and didn't re-read the whole thing.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
stephc_int13 3mo ago
Zuckerberg was barely adult when he started Facebook. And he probably bumped into a few older guys who thought they knew better than him, and history proved them wrong. He likely developed some irrational belief that clever and young beats anything else, and saw an echo of his own bravado in Alexandr Wang. Turns out his heuristics were not calibrated properly.

tgsovlerkhgsel 3mo ago

I wonder when (if ever) the companies realize that demoralizing your workforce (and destroying that sector of the job market) doesn't have only advantages. I know plenty of people that reacted with the desired fear, putting in long hours to avoid layoffs, willingness to accept lower pay because the job market sucks, etc. - but I think there are also plenty of the the mythical 10x engineers that just checked out, stopped being 10x engineers, and are just collecting their paychecks and waiting for the layoff now. And I'm not sure you can "get them back", ever. At least some companies reacted to this with more top-down management, stricter metrics etc. which kills motivation further and leads to metric optimization. Tell a good, smart, motivated engineer that you want more AI usage, and he's going to maybe start using some AI where it makes sense, but mostly ignore the metric while trying to do useful work. Demotivate the same engineer and make clear that his paycheck depends on metrics, and he'll give you what you're asking for, except https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn is probably not what you _wanted_...

fridder 3mo ago
Exactly. With the broad layoffs some companies do, you learn the company doesn’t value you, so why should you value the company?
- kermatt 3mo ago
  You should not. Jobs are ephemeral, as companies consider employees to be replaceable / expendable cogs in the machine. Keeping expectations equal makes sure all parties benefit. Companies base their decisions on revenue and cost, employees should as well. Any past illusions that loyalty to a company has personal beneift are long since dispelled.
overgard 3mo ago
Yeah, working harder to avoid a layoff in a big company doesn't really work out - by the time you know about the layoffs they've probably already made their decisions about who stays and goes anyway. Plus that higher rate of effort might be unsustainable and you end up leaving on your own accord anyway or burning out. Layoffs somewhat change the employment arrangement too for the people that stay: "we pay you the same but now you're expected to do the work of the missing people"

GodelNumbering 3mo ago

Very shallow wrapper around the reuters piece (https://www.reuters.com/business/zuckerberg-says-ai-agent-development-going-slower-than-expected-2026-07-02/ https://www.reuters.com/business/zuckerberg-says-ai-agent-de... ), I dont think author adds any tangible value

laweijfmvo 3mo ago
in fact i’d say it’s a rather poor wrapper and sensationalizes far beyond what reuters actually reported. e.g. the unsupported claim that Zuckerberg somehow put Alex Wang “in charge of the entire company.”
- EshuMarneedi 3mo ago
  I literally supported the claim by linking to this reporting, which effectively says the same thing. (And yes, I did make an HN account for this.) https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/why-is-meta-destroying-its-engineering https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/why-is-meta-destr...
Esophagus4 3mo ago
Thank you for the original. Given that, the pattern I saw in my head was that Zuck sees a new toy, get excited and thinks it will change everything, invests in it, then admit he’s wrong, but at least we have an ads business to keep this whole thing rolling along. Rinse and repeat. Reminds me a lot of crypto payments, metaverse / VR / AR. A man trying to predict the future and being mostly incorrect while not really facing any consequences of being wrong. Always searching for the next big thing. Classic Silicon Valley tale.

glimshe 3mo ago

This is another piece of evidence against the "Zuckerberg Exceptionalism" theory. I've argued before that he is neither a great leader nor a particularly intelligent person outside some alleged Math talent. He was, at best, a competent entrepreneur and very hard worker who was in the right place at the right time. Meta's strategy is the kind of thing many/most people here could have come up with: * "We have lots of users, let's show them more ads" * "They are doing AI, let's do AI". * "I've watched Ready Player One, let's build VR". Duh.

4fffsa 3mo ago
math talent is over-rated. I know many math talented guys - olympiad level. What are they doing 30 yrs on? nothing special. The unfortunate truth for many is (and the lie they got told) - none of that stuff has any relevance to large contributions in the economy.

fullshark 3mo ago

That quote doesn't support the headline

paxys 3mo ago

Meta is in a weird place because Zuck is at this point very far removed from day to day company operations and its overall culture, but still wants to be the one calling all the shots. Plus just like Musk and others he has megalomania and wants to rule the world. And considering his hold of the company no one can really argue with him. You can pretty much see his thought process in real time. "Google and OpenAI have built these cool LLM things, but I have the best engineers in the world so obviously I should be driving that technology. Go build it for me." Turns out his engineers aren't very effective at building it. "Obviously I need to fire all these lazy employees and replace them with the best industry talent. They aren't going to refuse my money." So he throws billions at a few top AI researchers, but they produce nothing of value. "I don't understand, why am I still not winning? It must be because the AI industry itself is now moving at a very slow pace.

red_admiral 3mo ago
It's probably chance, but this post is at the top of HN right next to https://weli.dev/blog/half-baked-product/ https://weli.dev/blog/half-baked-product/. Seems like you don't need to be a young startup founder to get your dough in a twist.
zurfer 3mo ago
> So he throws billions at a few top AI researchers, but they produce nothing of value. so he spends 1% of yearly revenue on AI talent to catch up? we can't judge if they have produced nothing of value, no? They don't owe the world to open source their work? Meta has plenty of failings, but taking risks and investing optimistically is not on my list. I guess the sentiment here on HN is probably biased by the addictive nature of its products.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
sharts 3mo ago
The guy is out of touch with society.

meerita 3mo ago

Maybe the best solution is not to fire good engineers and replace them with AI, but to remove the useless "vibe" managers who are basically the bottleneck for everything.

KaiserPro 3mo ago

> I can’t tell if Zuckerberg is dimwitted or just evil. The problem during the first era of the AI boom (circa 2023) was indeed that Meta was too slow to identify the metaverse flub. Former meta wanker here. Its both. but also its the structure around Zuckerberg that makes it worse. First Zuckerberg only cares about tech, he doesn't care about product. he loves research, and he loves new things that can be done with the research that he's been sponsoring. People management, politics, product design is all stuff that is outsourced. Now, rightly, Zuckerberg has trust issues. Everyone either tells him he's brilliant or a massive cunt. there is no inbetween. This means he has an inner circle that manages his action flow and diffuses it into the organisiation. This is problematic because they are not there because of competence, virtually all of them are there because they have been at facebook for a long time. Its network not competence. Facebook used to (it was less before I left) bang on about this being "your company" as in it was a town hall of ideas, and the best would bubble up to the top, the rest would dissolve into the primal talent pool. This means that the company "product team" were setup and still to some extent to be information brokers, they would pull the best initiatives and show them selectively to Zuck. They didnt really provide strong vision about what the "facebook" product should be. Combine that with the 6month PSC cycle, where you have to demonstrate "impact", means you have lots of half baked single ideas that bubble up, get tested and then either kinda fizzle out or stay there like a fucking cancer. These ideas are driven by metrics of a sub department of a sub department of a sub department. At one point the notifications on the facebook app were owned by more than one team, possibly three, with a overall family of app notification team(I get hazy on this, whatever it was there were many many people who's job was to move images around on the notification panel by minute amounts and work out if that drove screen time) This means that direction is hard, mainly because there is none from the centre, and that the company flow isn't designed for a single design to be implemented globally. There isn't enough glory to go around to feed the senior ++ staff engineers who get paid $3m a year to specialise is tweaking the colour of the border of buttons in the facebook app by 3%. Boz bills himself as the "moderator" and "unblocker" not the arbiter of taste, or the "facebook style". I don't think Cox has publicly ever uttered any words of substance. the point is, none of them have said "here is the experience design that we want, go and make this work so that it looks and feels like this". Its all "ok this feature moved MAU by .0005% lets ship that one" There is one exception to all of that: monetization. If monetization want to change something for whatever reason, then they get it. Gambling adverts in your notifications? sure, creating an audience group for tweens that have just deleted a selfie? fuckyeah Hiding fraud from the outside world? sure is 10% of global revenue enough? TLDR: Zuck is politically naive, and consistently fails to learn. He is reliant of his inner circle to spoon feed him decisions outside his competency areas

LogicFailsMe 3mo ago

"I can’t tell if Zuckerberg is dimwitted or just evil." I'll go with both... I think the guy made some real moves early on, but it's been a while since whatsapp and instagram. And since then, if the tales in Careless People are to be believed, so much smoke has been blown up his digestive endpoint that he's mostly smoke now.

fridder 3mo ago
His most innovative move was acquisition
- watwut 3mo ago
  The word innovative does n9t mean anything anymore. It became synonym with "earns a lot of money". People who innovate without becomming super rich dont get ackwnowledged as innovative. CEO buys or copy an app - innovative.
  - LogicFailsMe 3mo ago
    As someone who made advances in two mostly independent fields (arguably 3), 100%! But also, while I'm not mega rich, I'm very comfortable, if only to keep me from stirring the pot some more with my troublemaking nature. This is where Tom Lehrer's advice that selling out is OK if you get a good price comes into play. And yes, satire, but surprisingly good career advice in the real world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yz-Aed356kA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yz-Aed356kA
- josefresco 3mo ago
  Buying a competitor to which you are losing in an emerging market is not innovative it's the opposite statement: We lack innovation internally and need to look outside the company.
- alok-g 3mo ago
  And now we have Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Account Manager that links the usernames, features to post Instagram posts to Facebook also and vice versa, people sharing links to their Instagram/Facebook posts via WhatsApp statuses, ... what a mess.

overgard 3mo ago

I'm kind of curious, whatever happened to Zuckerberg's AI clone? I haven't heard about it recently but it was one of the uh, more interesting AI stories.

croes 3mo ago

> I can’t tell if Zuckerberg is dimwitted or just evil. Evil > Zuckerberg's increasingly bizarre war on whistleblowers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48698684 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48698684

eagerpace 3mo ago

Everyone I have seen in a corporate environment is using it to do their existing work faster. The rest of the organization has not yet evolved to take advantage of these new tools.

Planktonne 3mo ago

At some point, after repeated rounds of ineffective hire-and-fire cycles, it becomes impossible to avoid admitting that the problem is the management.

burnt-resistor 3mo ago
The root cause is workers not unionizing and forming worker-owned co-ops rather than depending on the whims of idiot-jerks running corporations.

ilamont 3mo ago

In retrospect, he said, the “trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected,” and that the company’s bets on the new structure “haven’t come to fruition yet.” Zuckerberg was referring to AI agents, automated systems that can execute tasks on behalf of a user. Conversations he was having “with our top people” when they started planning the restructuring in January and February “were that they were worried that we weren’t going to move fast enough to adapt,” Zuckerberg said. If Zuckerberg is seeing problems, that means other large tech firms that also followed the siren call of AI transformation and opted to quickly shake things up are likely feeling similar pains. For instance, Andy Jassy spouted very similar language in his 2025 letter to Amazon shareholders (https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-ceo-andy-jassy-2025-letter-to-shareholders https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-ceo-and...) which was followed by layoffs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46748603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46748603). What have we seen since? Lots of stuff breaking, from seller-focused tech (https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions?sortBy=relevance&dateRange=pastYear&replies=repliesAll&contentType=ALL&searchTerm=attribute https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions?s...) to cloud services. Amazon now mandates senior engineers to sign off on AI-generated code (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47323017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47323017), even though that will interfere with the mandate to "move fast and operate the like the world's biggest startup."

ozgrakkurt 3mo ago
> Amazon now mandates senior engineers to sign off on AI-generated code This will never work because then you are expecting the more experienced people to be reviewing endless slop coming from less experienced people. They will either do a bad job to comply or just quit
- andrekandre 3mo ago
  > reviewing endless slop coming from less experienced people oh, thats easy to handle; just have another ai review the slop for you. see how easy that was? PRODUCTIVITY UNLOCKED. /s (just in case)

migueldeicaza 3mo ago

Lives were destroyed, families were in turmoil, but look at the bright side: it was a learning moment.

jqpabc123 3mo ago

company’s bets on the new structure “haven’t come to fruition yet. It's metaverse deja vu.

sneak 3mo ago

Has Zuckerberg ever deliberately invented a successful product using skill and taste? His original moneymaker was sort of happenstance, a right-place-right-time quick hack that lucked out, got traction, and raised enough money to scale out, BIG, with essentially the same concept that he lucked upon. Instagram and WhatsApp, both absolutely successful beyond imagination, were acquisitions. Same goes for Oculus. Has Zuckerberg/Meta ever once themselves deliberately sat down and invented and built something great masses of people want? Facebook doesn't count; that was happenstance. He didn't hack that together in a day to get a billion users, or perhaps even to build a "product" at all. They tried doing hardware with that Echo Show knockoff, afaik nobody really bought it. They tried the metaverse thing, and, again, nobody really wanted it. (I'm still not convinced it doesn't have legs; the way they did it was obviously not it.) React and zstd don't count, obviously.

abroszka33 3mo ago
No, but did any of the other big companies? Google literally found the transformer architecture but had no idea what to do with it.
- xboxnolifes 3mo ago
  Google.com, Chrome, and Gmail we all very tasteful products. Gmail won more on storage space, but each of the products were distinctly fairly clean design for their time.
  - paradox460 3mo ago
    Google maps basically reinvented how people think about Internet maps
    - abroszka33 3mo ago
      Yes, and Google purchased the technology, did not invent it.

detourdog 3mo ago

Not impressed with the quote from Zuckerberg. I see it as a very shallow analysis. I think the stated goal of Agentic development is too amorphous to know what might work. I assume they thought there were too many voices in the development so they had layoffs only to find that wasn't the issue. Why would layoffs make work happen faster.

bwfan123 3mo ago

The bigger story here is that the AI agents were not effective. This is a huge admission and explains why Anthropic, OpenAI, and now Microsoft are creating giant teams of FDEs (forward deployed engineers). It ties in with Meta becoming a GPU cloud to sell "excess AI compute". xai and now meta renting excess AI compute and shovel-vendors are trying to keep the embers alive with free tokens in a last-ditch effort.

meindnoch 3mo ago

Layoffs will continue until morale improves.

jmyeet 3mo ago

All of these tech companies have fallen into the Wall Street trap and it will be their ultimate undoing. Meta probably more than most. I feel like a broken record but Google cracked this particular nut in the 2000s by creating an environment where people could flourish who would otherwise suffer in Corporate America. Google studied this and found in the 2010s that psychological safety was the number one factor in team success [1]. Corporate America typically has what's called an "up or out" mentality. Jack Welch dogmatic thinking rules here. Fire the bottom 5% every year and if you don't get promoted within a certain period, get rid of you because you've reached your potential. This is what created things like stack ranking (which is nothing more than a popularity contest) and smoothing of performance ratings. The last one is toxic because a certain percentage of ratings have to be subpar (ie below "Meets Expectations"). All of this destroys collaboration and creates an environment where those who are more political and more likable rise to the top. And guess what? Your autistic engineers who otherwise flourished in early Google can't function effectively in such an environment. And these are the people who otherwise become subject-matter experts in storage systems, networking and other niche topics. At some point innovation ends and the only way to satisfy the insatiable appetite for increasing profits is to raise prices and/or cut costs. So all these companies have engaged in the suppression of wages despite being wildly profitable on a per-employee basis. As for Zuckerberg in particular, he clearly has no idea where to go with Meta and the AI division is a disaster. The posterchild for bad decision-making and leadership was the Metaverse because $70B+ was spent on an idea with no product-market fit. There were other less expensive boondoggles (eg Libra). So Zuck hired like crazy in the pandemic because that's what everyone else did and has now engaged in massive layoffs because, well, that's what everyone else is doing and he has no idea what to do with those people. Notice how it's leadership errors that are massively disruptive to people's lives but they suffer none of the consequences when they're responsible? Yeah, me too. [1]: https://psychsafety.com/googles-project-aristotle/ https://psychsafety.com/googles-project-aristotle/

andrekandre 3mo ago
> Corporate America typically has what's called an "up or out" mentality. Jack Welch dogmatic thinking rules here. and it has spread all over the world, damaging quality and trustworthiness everywhere it spreads > Notice how it's leadership errors that are massively disruptive to people's lives but they suffer none of the consequences when they're responsible? i think this is what people nowadays call "freedom and meritocracy" (only slightly sarcastic here)

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

flowerthoughts 3mo ago

Fire first, ask questions later.

sometimelurker 3mo ago

I'm gunna say something crazy sounding that might be insensitive but is really obviously true to anyone that thinks about it for a few seconds. Meta throwing away a ton of really good talent is probably better for the world by a large degree. It is better if less very smart people work for them. We do not need more tracking algo's and unsafe uninterpretable AI (search 'meta coconut latent reasoning paper') made by a company that's fine with using the information of when teen girls delete selfies to sell them ads for beauty products. We don't.

4fffsa 3mo ago
This is gonna sound evil but idc. If I hire ex-Meta guys its for one reason only: squeeze them dry to repent their sins. Literally squeeze, squeeze... and squeeze and til they quit. Personally I wish others would do it too. Working there is a choice.
- sometimelurker 3mo ago
  ok, that is evil because this would inflict pain on people to no overall benefit. this is equivalent to saying "prisons should torture the worst criminals", which would be insane > Working there is a choice look into non-competition clauses, there's a real chance its not. also people who work there are not somehow vastly less moral than those that work at Google ect
  - 4fffsa 3mo ago
    as below - dont care
- braebo 3mo ago
  Two wrongs don’t make a right my friend.
  - 4fffsa 3mo ago
    dont care

sharts 3mo ago

Smartest folks in the room. Greatest capital allocators we have. Maybe that’s what happens when systems not only permit but encourage and reward failing upwards.

taffydavid 3mo ago

Zuckerbergs ineffectiveness was evident long before the examples mentioned in this article. He failed to counter the rise of Twitter, failed to combat misinformation during elections, directly contributing to the result of the brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump in 2016

phillipcarter 3mo ago

Missing in here is the nuance that Meta was absolutely not too late to the first AI boom with Llama, and at one point were the clear leaders of the OSS alternative LLM space. But they blew it up themselves with the disastrous Llama 4 release which included, amongst immense self-imposed delays, lies on benchmarks. No wonder nobody wants to use their tech.

hn_throwaway_99 3mo ago

This article is classic 20/20 hindsight that you always see when a business decision doesn't pan out. From the author: > The self-created tragedy of Meta is that the company is loath to invent new products. Instead, Meta’s management more or less relies on “vibes” to govern its decisions, and those vibes are often either wrong or far too late. The most pertinent example of the former is the ill-fated metaverse, which was developed solely on the (unbelievable) whim that the pandemic would last forever — or at least far longer than it actually did — and people would become accustomed to replacing in-person interaction with virtual reality. It was precisely at this moment, roughly around mid-2020, that Meta (then Facebook) disintegrated from a social media company into a Ship of Theseus that still technically operated its core social platforms but fundamentally was distracted by a red herring. Vibes-based management. This is bullshit. All businesses need to take calculated risks, which sometimes don't pan out. The reason Zuck went full bore into VR/AR is because he desperately understood (correctly, IMO) that not owning a major computing platform was a huge risk. Microsoft had Windows on the desktop, Apple and Google had iOS and Android on mobile. When iOS restricted advertiser tracking (requiring opt in, which nearly every same person thought was a good thing) it cost Facebook a ton of money. So Zuckerberg made a big bet that VR/AR would be the next big computing platform. Except the bet flopped. Turned out very few people want a big pair of goggles strapped to their face all day. But Facebook wasn't alone in making a bad bet - Apple spent billions on Vision Pro, and that's basically dead. The problem isn't that Facebook made a big bet that flopped, and that alone isn't "vibes management". The problem is that since Zuck has majority voting power, basically all decisions come down to him and nothing is tempered by the expectations/desires of others, so you get this "pendulum" management as I call it. Sometimes you have these visionary leaders and it works out, but a lot of times it crashes over time. Musk runs his companies largely the same way, and while obviously it has worked out well for his companies and shareholders, it's widely known now that employees at his companies see a primary task as "managing Musk". Tesla's self-driving capabilities are far behind Waymo despite having a lot more driving data, and a big issue is Musk's insistance on cameras only. I've seen comments here on HN that any self-respecting AI leader would never work for X AI because the marching orders are basically "grok has to say what Musk wants". Having an "emperor CEO" means the company can move quickly, but that goes for both beneficial and detrimental directions.

xinan 3mo ago

It’s interesting to see how all these big techs are going from “hiring with best with attractive comp package” directly to “saving the most by replacing employees with something that sometimes does the right thing”.

queenkjuul 3mo ago

> I can’t tell if Zuckerberg is dimwitted or just evil He's always clearly been both