I also work at Meta. The chaos and instability is awful. But I think they could fire pretty much everyone and the ads business would still continue to grow at nearly the same rate.
I think it will take a very long time for leadership to feel the effects of what they've done.
> I also work at Meta. The chaos and instability is awful. But I think they could fire pretty much everyone and the ads business would still continue to grow at nearly the same rate.
I spent 5 years at Facebook (2013-18), and I can guarantee you that if you fired the sales teams, revenue would take a pretty large hit.
More generally my friend who was there till last year (at a pretty senior manager level) said that once the AAP thing happened with Apple, it got really really nasty.
Like, every company tends towards the median of it's geographies over time but Facebook was a pretty special place to work at back in the day, and it looks like a lot of that has been lost now.
the entre into the culture via his wife isn't anything to shake a stick at, but don't anthropomorphize the Zuck -- he's there because there are 1 billion people who already live in a surveillance state.
cheap programmers, long 996 hours, and access to the biggest market in the world.
> The median of its employees’ geographies is China. That’s how it got worse than your average maturing Bay Area company
I mean, this was true when I joined in 2013. One guy I worked with was the only non-Chinese person working with the targeting team. So I really don't think it can be reduced to such a simple explanation.
To be honest, Facebook acquired lots more US business culture, and that's (personally) where I think lots of the rot came from.
Some Facebook ad forums have gone from frustration to extreme hyperbole (e.g. death penalty for Meta execs). The "you're doing it wrong" replies have also shifted to more of "having the same problem". We would like to advertise again on Meta, but it looks quite scary to start again. We've even received two bills from Meta, though we have not advertised since 2020. Contested one and got a discount, the other was smaller and I didn't contest. Trying to disconnect everything currently.
I'm guessing you have 0 insight into the work that the ads, ranking, apps, and sales teams do to keep the gravy train flowing and even expanding 30% every year. If Meta fired even just half the ranking workers, the recommendation models (both ads and feeds) would very quickly become stale and start shedding many Fortune 500 companies worth of revenue.
When I read parent say "pretty much everyone", I assume the hypothetically not-cut people are still a thousands large skeleton crew keeping the cash cow fed and happy. What did you think they meant? 3 execs and an janitor?
I'm sure whatever your role at facebook is, it is very important. There are people who recognize how valuable your contributions were/are/will be. You probably won't find that validation on HN.
But I have enough money now and no amount of more money (that Meta could reasonably offer for my role) would make it worth staying. This place sucks now.
Are you brave, or ready to resign by posting publicly that your current employer sucks?
Either way, it’s wild watching several people in this thread literally not care if they get fired. I guess the article really is accurate.
Maybe I’m miscalibrated, but “I work at X. This place sucks” has never been a safe thing to say openly, so it’s interesting seeing it from multiple people here.
Plus there’s the usual angle of people not wanting to hire someone that’s willing to publicly trash their current employer. Will you be as vocal next job?
Don’t get me wrong, I respect that you’re outspoken. It’s just very twilight zone, so I’m trying to figure out the implications.
BTW, I appreciate people's candor, and don't want to spoil it, but I feel obligated to point out, to people criticizing big-tech employers, that HN pseudonymous/anonymous identities aren't very secure...
You might have a good amount of faith in dang (as do I), to not, say, let the investment firm sell HN account identity info to data brokers.
And HN is almost unique among popular sites, in not running any apparent third-party trackers at all.
But HN occasionally turns on Google reCaptcha, which I suspect could unmask most pseudonymous/anonymous identities here. Especially since it wasn't expected.
Unmasked, along with their entire past and future comment history, of which Google and other tech companies might have firehose feeds.
(I've emailed hn@ my concerns about people not expecting big-tech trackers on HN, but I suspect that HN is occasionally in a difficult position, due to attacks.)
> Plus there’s the usual angle of people not wanting to hire someone that’s willing to publicly trash their current employer. Will you be as vocal next job?
Someone at Meta saying it sucks publicly and that they no longer want to be there would be a positive hiring signal for many people.
Good point, that makes sense. It happens to be a special case, so they’re saying it here. But in general very few will probably be saying “this place sucks” about their employer.
Good (or at least smart) employers pay quite a lot of money on quarterly anonymised surveys precisely to hear what their employees truly think about the company. I think some shareholders care about those numbers as well enough to want to see them. Of course there is a difference between saying what is obvious to anyone interested anyway (like above) and crying publicly over some petty grievance.
Besides, if the company only seeks spineless lackeys would you want to work there anyway?
I don't understand the mindset of being surprised that people are honest about their own opinions about their work. I don't have any uniquely bad concerns about my employer so I don't think I've ever written anything like the GP, but I have spoken honestly about my past experiences. If we can't be honest about how we think and feel about something we spend the majority of our time and energy doing, aren't we just being oppressed?
I mean, from the post it sounds like they already have a bank account large enough to say what they want without any repercussions having any side effects, such as unemployment.
Also, not all future employers are totally worried about that, especially when those that were doing the speaking have a very wanted set of skills. Quite often the future employer is like "Oh yea, everyone knows Meta/FB is balls, glad you pointed it out", especially in the case they are much smaller than the mega company.
I work in integrity (keeping bad stuff off the platform). My job is to reduce the harm Meta causes. So I'm at peace with myself. I don't think I could work in any other area of Meta though.
Cool. Maybe you can tell me why when I reported a private message that was like "Looking for a super easy part-time job? Earn $100-$10000 per day working from anywhere! [...]" as spam, I got a response that the message didn't go against community standards and no action was being taken.
The difference, I think, is that the former are platforms to run applications while the latter are communication platforms. There used to be a time when the phone company could press charges if you connected your "app" (a tone-generating machine) to their "API" (the phone line) to "do things the official app didn't support" (place long distance calls for free). It will always be beneficial to someone who owns a communication channel to assume as much control of the pipe as possible. If Twitter could jack directly into your brain stem and refuse to work until you install its client on your wetware, it would.
I haven't been able to confirm with any certainty that Meta enforces domain ownership verification but I would love to see a confirmation that Meta does indeed do this or plans to do so in the future.
If Meta's advertising network does not enforce domain ownership verification, then it is fundamentally vulnerable to the same problem described on this blog post.
Sampled URL resolution cannot prove anything about a URL.
I'd rather Meta just clearly stated if they require domain ownership verification when spoofing links. Lack of this (or similarly effective) protection mechanism enables automated link fraud.
Reminder for adtech company employees in this thread: If you suspect a crime has taken place (e.g. if you have seen internal documentation showing that potential profit outweighed the security benefit of actually enforcing a policy), you can blow the whistle to regulators.
Maybe have them look at how many "Breastfeeding" videos I get on FB. Seriously, I hardly ever log-in anymore, but when I do and no matter how much I report or "hide" that content, I keep getting it. It looks to be link/page farms from Asia and India that create them with generic sounding names.
Yes, not link fraud but pure, unadulaterated self-promo spam in IG comments along the lines of "I subscribed to this account and no regrets, it's all I need! Laughs every day!" constantly pinned at the top.
I do also see the occasional Bitcoin links and other linkspam on IG as well.
Edit: Dear downvoters, is this a threat to your precious growth hack, or?
You're being downvoted because your complaint is unrelated to the post topic. It's about scam ads masquerading as linked to trusted domains (an ad that shows it links to "adobe.com", but actually takes you to scamsite.com when you click it).
I owned zip folders for a while during the windows Vista days. I could have sworn the code was originally purchased, not written by someone at Microsoft. Honestly, it looked like it had been run through an obfuscator. I assumed that the original author had done that to ensure it was difficult for Microsoft to make changes/improvements.
I may be misremembering, but Dave has spoken on his Dave's Garage Youtube channel about running a separate software business selling small utilities and later selling some of them to Microsoft. This might have been one of them. A quick search confirms that he also claims that here:
He talks about it in one of his videos. The zip directory was a product of a side hustle of his, which Microsoft then bought out. In the video he comments how much easier it was to integrate when he had access to more internal apis.
I'm currently self employed, but I just accepted a role in big tech. After 4 years I was able to set up my recruiting company to run without me, so I can earn about $300K-$500K per year from that, plus my full-time salary.
I'm also working on a new SaaS product (co-pilot + CRM for small recruiting agencies). I'm looking for someone to work on it with me. Tech stack is svelte kit + node + python for custom models. I have an audience of 160K followers on LinkedIn, mostly recruiters, that I can reach when the product is launched.
If you are looking for an interesting side project that will generate revenue, email robert at getditto dot com.
It's still strange to me to work in a field of computer science where we say things like "we're not exactly sure how these numbers (hyper parameters) affect the result, so just try a bunch of different values and see which one works best."
> "we're not exactly sure how these numbers (hyper parameters) affect the result, so just try a bunch of different values and see which one works best."
Isn't it the same for anything that uses a Monte Carlo simulation to find a value? At times you'll end up on a local maxima (instead of the best/correct) answer, but it works.
We cannot solve something used a closed formula so we just do a billion (or whatever) random samplings and find what we're after.
I'm not saying it's the same for LLMs but "trying a bunch of different values and see which one works best" is something we do a lot.
LLMs were very much engineered... the exact results they yield are hard to determine since they're large statistical models, but I don't think that categorizes the LLMs themselves as a 'discovery' (like say Penicilin)
There’s an argument that all maths are discovered instead of invented or engineered. LLM hardware certainly is hard engineering but the numbers you put in it aren’t, once you have them; if you stumbled upon them by chance or they were revealed to you in your sleep it’d work just as well. (‘ollama run mixtral’ is good enough for a dream to me!)
I understand your distinction, I think, but I would say it is more engineering than ever. It's like the early days of the steam engine or firearms development. It's not a hard science, not formal analysis, it's engineering: tinkering, testing, experimenting, iterating.
I believe, from what I saw in Mathematics, this is a matter of taste. Discovered or invented are 2 perspectives. Some people prefer to think that light is reaching in previously dark corners of knowledge waiting to be discovered(discover). Others prefer to think that by force of genius they brought the thing into the world.
To me, personally, these are 2 sides of the coin, without one having more proof than the other.
This can be laid at the feet of Minsky and others who dismissed perceptrons because they couldn't model nonlinear functions. LLMs were never going to happen until modern CPUs and GPUs came along, but that doesn't mean we couldn't have a better theoretical foundation in place. We are years behind where we should be.
When I worked in the games industry in the 1990s, it was "common knowledge" that neural nets were a dead end at best and a con job at worst. Really a shame to lose so much time because a few senior authority figures warned everyone off. We need to make sure that doesn't happen this time.
Answering the GP's point regarding why deep learning textbooks, articles, and blog posts are full of sentences that begin with "We think..." and "We're not sure, but..." and "It appears that..."
we have no theories of intelligence. We're like people in the 1500s trying to figure out why and how people get sick, with no concept of bacteria, germs, transmission, etc
I haven't seen this key/buzzword mentioned yet, so I think part of it is the fact that we're now working on complex systems. This was already true (a social network is a complex system), but now we have the impenetrability of a complex system within the scope of a single process. It's hard to figure out generalizable principles about this kind of thing!
I mean, it’s kind of in the name isn’t it? Computer science. Science is empirical, often poorly understood and even the best theories don’t fully explain all observations, especially when a field gets new tools to observe phenomena. It takes a while for a good theory to come along and make sense of everything in science and that seems like more or less exactly where we are today.
Welcome to engineering. We don't sketch our controlled systems and forget all about systems theory. Instead we just fiddle with out controllers until the result is acceptable.
I think it will take a very long time for leadership to feel the effects of what they've done.