My uneducated opinion is this company had some downsizing and restructuring coming. But the leading edge of a big wave of downsizes might look like this, too.
Yeah, I'm with you, and then I read 83K employees doing Metaverse? Simply amazing! That must be at least 20 billion dollars a year! The correction in the tech sector has plenty more correcting to do it seems.
My guess is Google/Alphabet will do the same, as they have too high a proportion of people doing things that are neither basic research or contributing to revenue in any way. You can see how that can happen when you have an unconstrained gusher of money. There's effectively zero feedback. However given the weakness of their management (see: gusher of money + lack of focus) it's unlikely that the cuts will make any difference either way. Probably many good people will simply take a buy out and then go get another interesting job.
Netfix? Given their culture and their market problems one could imagine it, but their culture seems to have steered them into trying to fight back. So probably not a big wave, just some trimming, as they have already done.
As for the rest of maAMA-n? They appear to be doing fine; Amazon's retail challenges are more than made up by AWS. Apple and MS are trundling along as if nothing is happening in the macroenvironment (and they each have 40+ years to have worked out their systems).
Apple is down like 6% today on reports of soft iPhone sales. In an economy where people are actually belt tightening luxury hardware sales are not exactly recession proof
I’m not an Apple bear, I’m saying that it’s a bit naive to say that any company will not be negatively affected by a recession that can result in downsizing or layoffs.
Vanguard and Blackrock are the largest outside shareholders and are unlikely to take shareholder action. Third is Berkshire Hathaway and while they do weigh in from time to time it's unlikely in this case.
> As for the rest of maAMA-n? They appear to be doing fine; Amazon's retail challenges are more than made up by AWS. Apple and MS are trundling along as if nothing is happening in the macroenvironment (and they each have 40+ years to have worked out their systems).
Netflix looks shaky as hell. They need a huge bet, like Rings of Power or House of Dragons. The entire programming looks so completely awful cookie cutter at the moment.
Such a poor plan. Dropping this in a Q&A means that nothing else said will be remembered. It's also being implemented in a completely asinine way: "individual teams will sort out how to handle headcount changes". Take no culpability for anything, and ensure that the confusion and anger targets the bottom-most level of management. What a classy move!
I'm sure that senior leadership will also be held accountable for the over-hiring they mandated and their teams will be among the first to reduce headcount \s
This is really hyperbolic. Facebook is not even closely comparable to those. Additionally, there's no market indication that won't be a need for services like AWS or hardware provided by Apple.
It's really weird how many people seem to _want_ the tech industry to just wither and die. It's unlikely and unrealistic. There may be a sharp correction, but it's unrealistic to think that the behemoths with a moat are going anywhere.
No one said anything about tech dying (I said startups), but a repricing for sure.
We don't even know the market demand for these products because cheap money has made everyone a startup founder, and every company pivoted to providing a "tech" solution when it might not have been economically viable or provided any profit.
AWS is healthy. Apple is effectively immortal, but will slowly commoditize (10+ yrs) from lack of innovation.
Meta/Goog are (eng staff wise) oversized for their output. Both of their leaderships aren't leading very well.
Despite the hype and capabilities offered, none of the big players have find ways to use their AI assets. That's a poor indicator of their future. You can almost smell the disruption coming..
good point, other than applications in adtech for google/fb the only big tech company that is actually doing something with their ML expertise is nvidia IMO
Oh no the market has corrected to 2019 levels because the ridiculous amount of free cash has stopped! Clearly the era of tech is over and we should all wrap up and go home.
I don't think there is anything substantial here to suggest this is anything other than a normal recession and even if this was like the dotcom bubble, these companies aren't like dotcom era startups. They're massive behemoths intertwined with the fabric of American society, not to mention their warchests make most other companies blush.
2005 was a pretty shitty time to be in software. I could do without another one of those. If we avoid that level of suck for another 10 years I can just take early retirement.
Tech is much more integral to our lives than ever. I think what we might see instead is earning decreasing to a certain extent though. Non-FAANG type of companies still need plenty of tech; and they tend to pay decent enough.
> I don't think there is anything substantial here to suggest this is anything other than a normal recession
Then I'm guessing you haven't been paying much attention to anything.
Have you seen what's happening in the bond market these days? Looked at the insane actions the BoE is taking coupled with their insane tax policy? Have you seen the rising dollar are you aware the threat that makes to the entire global credit system?
I don’t know that I’m particularly concerned about the UK causing a global economic crisis. I am aware of what’s happening with them, I’m currently vacationing in Ireland so it’s been on the news but I just don’t know that the UK will be anything to cause larger global consequence.
I was not aware of the US bond market crumbling, and having a quick read it doesn’t seem to be, it seems to be a consequence of the fed raising rates which will obviously not continue indefinitely.
To be honest it still seems like a normal recession but with a bunch of hyperbolic news headlines attached.
The downvote arrow as slowly become a "truths I don't want to hear" button on HN.
Too much cheap money and a grow at any costs mentality has lead to exactly this is problem where every tech company is very tightly coupled with every other tech company.
I'm in the B2B space for one of the many non-profitable, recently IPO'd companies. As far as companies goes, this one is pretty sane. Healthy growth, a product that makes sense, thoughtful leadership. However when I look at our customers the vast majority are small tech startups, many of which will obviously cease to exist in a down turn.
When I look at our spending, it's mostly to other larger tech companies, those big tech companies everyone wants to work for.
But those small startups, that have weird products that don't make sense, price sensitive customers, unsustainable growth and crazy leadership, they make up a huge amount of our revenue. When they start to collapse, we'll have to downsize, both in headcount and in services we pay for. And we won't be alone.
On top of that, I look at my own spending. My other tech friends and I have no problem paying what would have been crazy amounts for services like Door Dash, or a constant stream of slightly over price but so convenient stuff from Amazon. Why not subscribe to another streaming services, it's only $10/month. So many of these direct to consumer companies mostly exist because of highly paid techworkers that have more cash than they need.
I get laid off I'll just pick up my food myself, I'm not going to be ordering everything of Amazon, I'm cancelling all but my most active subscriptions.
There are a lot of positive feedbacks in the current tech ecosystem what will continue to be triggered and continue to bring down the massive, massive tech bubble we're in.
Granted, we will all have trim the fat moment but I doubt the level of doom and gloom is warranted, as we are not in a "massive, massive tech bubble". If anything, tech hasn't penetrated enough into our lives yet.
Most likely; these services will evolve into a format where it is financially more viable - which might even allow them to reach larger audiences.
Ideally, this should happen in a slow fashion (which it seems to be happening). A sudden crash would be more chaotic, but on the long term I doubt we have much to worry about as a sector; there'll still be plenty of jobs for tech workers.
If it's likely you'll need layoffs, it's probably best to move as quickly as possible. Otherwise gossip, speculation, and fear have the chance to dominate.
Just in case you didn't recognize the reference - an early Facebook cultural motto is the phrase "move fast and break things" - a tradeoff favoring product development iteration speed over stable infrastructure.
Facebook would then change their motto in 2014 to "move fast with stable infrastructure" [0] - don't know how well that's worked out for them since.
Their main product sucks and their Boomer user base is literally dying. The acquisitions are keeping them in the game, but Insta has intense competition from TikTok and Snap and YouTube. They don’t have an unsinkable critical product that everyone uses and will continue to use through good and bad times, like search or mail.
Problem with snapchat is that no one older than 25 uses it. They've already saturated their user base and stuffed as many ads as they can into the app. There's not really anywhere for them to go and they're still losing money.
They refused Facebook's acquisition offer but I think their endgame is getting acquired by Google. Facebook offered $3bn but Google will have to offer much more, at least x5 more.
TikTok being banned would cause immense backlash with the public. Odds are higher it will get replaced before a ban takes place, and Insta isn't exactly stepping up.
Snapchat is still doing fine considering how much competition they have all over the place e.g. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube etc.
TikTok won't be banned because US will force it to relocate all their relevant servers to US and hand in US citizens' data to US agencies. And realistically speaking TikTok is no different than Microsoft, Google and Facebook; instead all data going to one superpower it flows to another and majority of this data is garbage that's inefficiently used to target you with personalized ads. Personal data is mostly garbage like I said but data about specific groups and overall population might be more valuable and important taking in consideration economic competition and arms race between US and China.
Not the OP, and this is just speculation on my part so take it with a grain of salt.
Meta gets the overwhelming majority (97.7%) of their revenue from advertising[1]. Their business model is completely reliant on using user data to sell highly targeted ads to sellers. While most consumers don't actually care what corporations do with their data, governments have been starting to crack down on the types of data that can be collected, and what it can be used for, especially with GDPR in the EU. The less data Meta can collect, the worse their targeted advertising will be, and fewer sellers will be willing to pay - or pay as much - for ads on their platforms. As it is, many companies are moving more towards influencer sponsorship for advertising, cutting platforms like Instagram out of the cost entirely.
The problem is that all of Meta's eggs are in one basket, and that basket's bound to drop. Most other big tech companies have more diverse revenue sources, and so are more robust.
That being said, I disagree with the premise - Netflix is probably going to the first FAANG company to fold.
They're still a dominant player in a 2 sided market. They still have traffic (within their site + ad network) and buyers (people wanting to place ads). Even if we remove all user tracking and nuke all attribution they're still going to make a lot of money. It will shift to more national type ad campaigns and/or targeting based on page content.
Much stronger competition in the streaming space. Disney has better content for every family with kids, so they're first choice. Amazon already has people via Prime. How many more are you going to buy? Possibly one, small chance of two? You've got Netflix and all the others scrambling for that last space in the house.
Plus they don't seem to be able to make a hit show of the kind that gets subscriptions, just a lot of not too terrible content.
Sure, but I do not see why that would cause bankruptcy. Their market cap would shrink, but unless they are over leveraged, they should be able to continue operating without “folding”.
It's not necessarily the case that the company goes bankrupt, it just sort of goes sideways forever. At some point someone will get the brilliant plan of borrowing in order to invest in relaunching the company.
This is interesting. As a parent, we have Netflix, not Dinsey+. See, children love to re-do things over and over, same for tv, my children want to watch wreck it ralph and moana for 100 times.
So, buy one of those "disney classics" bundles and you are good for a long chunk of time. Netflix covers the adults.
That's my feeling at least, I don't like a single adult show from disney.
Without the momentum of subscribers who just haven't bothered to unsubscribe, I suspect they'd already be dead. Like, if they had to acquire those same users fresh, today, I don't think they could.
If they play their cards right they could turn WhatsApp into the premier business to consumer contact platform. Not just messaging but also phone calls etc... That could massively reduce the spam calls.
Maybe you could opt in for political calls if they pay you..
Have you ever interviewed with Facebook/Meta? They don't do leetcode problems. Say what you want about them as a company, but I've done quite a few interviews in my career and their process was one of my favorites.
They don't ask leetcode questions for Front-end engineers AFAIK. It's mostly practical Javascript/DOM/browser questions.
Funnily enough though, I heard once you join as a Front-end engineer, you are pretty much a regular SWE and can join any team and work on any tech, even backend/systems.
I mean, they do ask algorithmic problems, but first, they're not "leetcode hard" (leetcode hards can get just insane, it's impractical to ask those in an interview setting), more like mediums, and second - out of 6 or 7 interviews maybe 2-3 will be those. Domain-specific / system design ones are more important. Though that depends on the level they're hiring for, I imagine fresh grads get more "write code on whiteboard" types of questions.
It doesn't matter. At the end of the day, all leetcode "style" questions fall into a particular bucket. Two pointers, graphs, etc. It's not like the company is innovating new types of problems. It's just the same problem reworded.
This has been my experience as well, same for Amazon.
I didn't practice that much since I hate wasting time on useless tasks, and the interviewer literally told me to just leetcode and read the interview book. I asked him a bunch of web questions and he had no fucking clue, all he did was leetcode and interview every year.
Maybe? 2020 for me. The first wave had me write code to solve a problem.... pretty far from Amazon's rebranded HackerRank/Leetcode nonsense. I was talking to a human being the entire time. They were great about making me feel like they WANTED me to succeed. Next round was more conversational/System Design stuff.
I think you're confused, when people say "they ask leetcode questions" they don't mean they do automated tests
The questions the human is asking you come from a big question bank and a lot of it is listed on LeetCode under the meta company tag because people leak them.
People use Leetcode to practice for those interviews, they don't use the leetcode site in the interview
When I did the system design interview the guy told me that zuckeberg created memcached. Not sure if he meant used or invented, could have just been a language thing. Anyway, I'm glad I didn't pass.
Completely not my experience. All the questions I got were word-for-word Leetcode problems. At least Amazon goes through the trouble of disguising them as "Amazon Deliver Trucks going from house to house" instead of "an array of numbers"
I got rejected on an obscure leetcode hard last year in the telephone screen, which was ridiculous considering I had enough practice to destroy leetcode hards.
Though it worked out for me in the end, but I was definitely annoyed for a day or two.
I got rejected and then when they inevitably called me up the next year the recruiter pulled up the feedback from my interview and I wasn't recommended because I rewrote a function to be easier to unit test, after being asked "how would you test this?". By rewrote I mean I added a parameter to take in a fictional db client, rather than instantiate directly.
Good to hear that it's changed if they're not. When I interviewed with Facebook, they asked a leetcode problem, had me come back into the office for a second one because I got strong feedback from all the other sessions, then rejected me with a suggestion that I should come back in 6 months when I'm better at tree traversals.
Um, when I interviewed, there were two leetcode problems administered by junior engineers to me. A recruiter contacted me recently about a role and I asked if they still ask leetcode questions... got crickets in response.
I had a radically different experience. The worst interview I've ever had was with FB about 9 years ago. I got an offer and it was significantly (like more than 2x) what I was being paid at the time and I turned it down because the interview experience was so awful I couldn't imagine working with the people who had conducted my interview. Even setting aside other ethical concerns, I've added FB to my permanent blacklist of companies I will never work for sheerly because of how shit their interview process is.
I'm interested in any evidence about this. I'm not agreeing or disagreeing its just a extremely general statement about 5 companies with no facts behind it and would be interested to see whats different between all 5 companies in 2022 in the talent acquisition department.
Well, a friend of mine was invited to an on-site interview at Google once, flew a few hours there, then arrived at the reception, waited for 7 hours, then they told him they forgot about him and he can go back home. Some people have bad experiences for many different reasons (shrug)... Pity it happened to you.
I interviewed with them 12 years ago, it was a long time ago but I remember all the interviewers felt like they had come from a funeral, everyone was absolutely miserable. I knew right then and there I could never work at a company with such negativity, also they wanted me to skip my honeymoon to start with them which I was not about to do so overall a terrible company and experience. And after I started learning about their shady business dealings I put them on a permanent blacklist to this day.
I interviewed with Meta a few months ago and all my interviewers were upbeat, enthusiastic, and excited. Meanwhile my Google and Amazon interviewers looked miserable and bored as fuck.
With Google it's actually been a pattern. Interviewed for them and passed HC three times, but each time I couldn't bring myself to work for them given how bored everyone looked.
> also they wanted me to skip my honeymoon to start with them
They must be really strange folks. I can't imagine 1) a company who would propose such a thing to a (potential) employee, 2) a person who would agree to that. Seriously, WTF.
I just joined Meta this year and had to solve leetcode-style problems, not sure what you mean? Maybe that they aren't literally taken from leetcode or taken on leetcode.com?
I legitimately cannot see this question in the current context as anything but being made in bad faith.
Do you seriously struggle to think of possible reasons for why someone would want to work for Meta? Something like "high pay, interesting/difficult challenges and problems to work on, large scale rarely found elsewhere, and lots of learning opportunities (including loads of great engineers to learn from)" never crossed your mind?
Not saying that those were the reasons OP used to make their choice, could have been plenty others. But given there are so many obvious possible reasons, the question in the context of the original comment feels just off.
P.S. I am neither current nor a former Meta employee. It is just jarring to see reddit-tier flamebait discourse in HN threads.
> Do you seriously struggle to think of possible reasons for why someone would want to work for Meta?
Yes, I struggle to think of a good reason to work for such a harmful company as Meta. People usually don't land there because of a desperate need for money, which would probably be one of the very few acceptable reasons for joining that company.
And why should my question be in good faith? Why should we not call out people who cheerfully join organizations that pose a threat to our future, and show no civic responsibility?
> I struggle to think of a good reason to work for such a harmful company as Meta
WhatsApp is an extremely useful product in my life. Instagram is nice for keeping up to date with some friends I don't get a chance to hangout in-person with often, as well as following some small local artist and museum pages. I dont care for FB as a product anymore, but pre-pandemic it was great for helping organize events with my friends. Oculus Quest 2 is a product I use daily and enjoy.
Most people outside of a subset of HN boiling in their own echochamber consider a lot of those products as useful in their lives, and will just give you the look of "huh, sounds interesting, i will look into it later. Oh, just remembered I had an appointment in an hour, welp gotta go, see ya later" if you try to give them that "harmful" spiel.
> And why should my question be in good faith?
Because that's what people come to HN for. If I wanted bad faith takes galore, I would need to go no further than reddit.
> Why should we not call out people who cheerfully join organizations that pose a threat to our future, and show no civic responsibility?
Because that's just your opinion. And it is sliding into QAnon-level justifications for using arguments like "why should we wear masks, when they pose a threat to our freedoms and the way of life!" and "why should we not storm the capitol, it is a civic responsibility to free ourselves from the shadow cabal's tyrrany and threat to our future!".
I don't agree with those QAnon takes, so I hope you realize that not everyone universally agrees with your takes either. And not because they are being paid by Meta or were "brainwashed".
I see a lot more negativity towards Facebook IRL than I do here on HN. If anything, the correlation seems to be that those closest to the tech industry are the ones most positive about it, while casual users are extremely negative.
> Yes, I struggle to think of a good reason to work for such a harmful company as Meta.
It seems you also struggle to understand that the majority of the world does not consider them to be a harmful company, and do not agree with your assessment of it.
Anti-disclaimer: I do not work for FAANG, nor have I. I also never had a FB/Instagram account. I'm not fond of Facebook, but I can see other people's perspectives.
> Yes, I struggle to think of a good reason to work for such a harmful company as Meta.
Then you aren't actually asking to learn. Instead you are judging the poster. That's a thing you can do, but couching it in a question is terrible forum etiquette.
> it's surprising that a person would share this publicly at this point in the company's history.
This is the part that tells me that maybe you are a bit out of touch with the general public.
Go to any college campus or talk to any student in a good CS program in the US. Meta is going to be on the list of some of the most sought after companies to get an internship or a fresh grad offer at. People post glowing humblebrag posts on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/TikTok/LinkedIn/etc. when they get a job offer from Meta, for their friends and followers to see. I see it on my own feeds not that rarely, and often from people I went to college with a while ago.
I cannot really feel the same level of excitement about a job like that to share it with others in a similar way. But you finding it "surprising that a person would share [that they got a job at Meta] publicly at this point in the company's history", as if it was something they would be ashamed about and attempt hiding, is somewhat telling.
> Now if this warrants deplatforming in the eyes of a resonable person
What warrants deplatforming is your straight up admitance that you had nothing to contribute, were not acting in good faith, and were just asking a question to attack someone.
Just say it with your chest. That way people can judge for themselves what the heck it is you are doing.
I think you're the one who's attacking users here. Asking why someone would join a company is not an attack, even if I have my reservations about the company, and I had no plans to further interact with them, but probably continue to have my opinions about their choice, unless they make a compelling argument.
My question was not made in bad faith, but insinuated to be a bad faith question by a different user, though as I said, I do understand the people who directly call out Meta employees, which I did not do here.
It is you and your peer who attacked the question, brought up conspiracy theories and called for deplatforming. So if you continue perhaps I'll be the one to reach out to mods. I have every damn right to ask someone on HN why they would work for Meta, without expecting intimidation from other users.
And yes, I continue to be surprised by people who would join Meta given all the shady and illegal things they've been doing over the years. So maybe one of you could give an honest answer, one that does not involve an attack. Maybe they weren't fully aware of Meta's issues, or people there generally don't care about these problems? That is what I was trying to understand.
You know you basically already admitting to acting in bad faith right? You said this: "And why should my question be in good faith?".
This is you basically admitting that it was all in bad faith in the first place, because, it is an attempt to justify it, by effectively questioning why your question should be asked in good faith in the first place.
I think you're reading the least charitable interpretation into my comments. The question was not asked in bad faith, but genuine surprise, while I'm also bothered by people acting as if a Meta employee could not be called out. You can be offended by the matter of an allegation being framed as something bad, and also not commit the alleged act.
For example an Amazon employee could be bothered by their union related question being perceived as critique, while also seeing no issue with someone condemning Amazon for their illegal union busting, and general disregard for the safety and well being of their warehouse staff.
Ok, so you agree that you should not ask questions in bad faith, and then when you later said "And why should my question be in good faith?", well that was a dumb question.
Glad I finally got you to the point of saying that we shouldn't ask people questions in bad faith, to attack them.
Just say what mean, and don't do this roundabout way of attacking people, with a flame-bait question.
And if you already agree that we should not ask people bad faith questions, then you saying "And why should my question be in good faith?" is bad faith itself, because you already know that we shouldn't do that.
No, I don't think any method of direct or indirect questioning is bad in this context, while you have a problem with both a roundabout and a direct critique of someone's employment choice, be it Meta or Amazon. You said it yourself that I should be direct in my critique so that I hopefully get deplatformed.
Find a less harmful employer instead of projecting your insecurities into someone's question, and trying to silence critique of any kind to ease your conscience.
Cool, so as I suspected, you support engaging in bad faith, and asking bad faith questions.
Just say that from the very beginning if that is your opinion. Not sure why you would do this song and dance of denial, if this is just what you believe.
I'm not sure what you're understanding from my comments at this point, but I said it early on that I see no problem with a bad faith question when it comes to questioning a Meta enginner's employment choice. I kept repeating the same thought over an over. You can be content with something in a specific case, and at the same time not engage in it. This also doesn't mean that someone will usually support a bad faith argument, or engage in it, as you seem to want to conclude.
> I said it early on that I see no problem with a bad faith question
Awesome! Got you to admit to it them! Now don't start crying when people accuse you of supporting asking questions in bad faith.
Just say "Yep, that is a totally valid thing to accuse me of supporting. I agree that you are correct in saying that I have no problem with asking questions in bad faith!".
You could have avoided all of this, if you just said that from the beginning.
I always think of the same question when I talk to someone who goes to work for Meta. High pay, sure, but that's available elsewhere.
Scale, by now, is surely an operations matter. If they're still having to innovate to perform at their current scale, what the hell have they been doing? In other words, aside from the VR distraction, what interesting challenges remain at Meta?
I know they have to rebuild their ad platform since Apple devastated it. But is "convincing people to look at advertisements" really still an interesting challenge? That's the point of view I don't understand, and would like to!
Not just pay, but also perks, people, and prestige. All of which will make your daily life as an engineer more pleasant and catapult your future career in ways the vast majority of other companies cannot.
Is it selfish? Perhaps. And maybe Meta will fall out of the pantheon of top tech companies at some point, but for now they’re still there.
The projects in their domain is definitely more interesting than slogging through yet another Generic Line of Business Project at Generic Tech Is A Cost Center Company where the vast majority of SWEs work.
Sorry, I must not have expressed my question clearly. Specifically which projects are interesting? They don't seem to be doing anything new, at least from the outside. I don't mean by that 'anything new for Facebook' but genuinely novel things, things you can't work on anywhere else.
Stipulated the rest of it -- what's the engineering challenge?
I dislike Meta as much as the average person here, but it's easy to imagine challenging projects at their scale.
Say for example using advanced engineering techniques to optimize existing processes to achieve a 0.1% speedup. That alone could save a couple million dollars with Meta's scale. And it's only possible with the kind of scale they have.
And of course outsiders wouldn't even notice such a thing.
Fair question - and to be honest, since I’ve never worked there - I don’t know.
But to counter that, again, what’s the interesting or exciting engineering challenges at the various mundane companies where the vast majority of SWEs work at?
Having worked at such “boring” companies, but recently transferred to an “exciting” company in the same tier as Meta, I can say the fundamental concept of my projects or work hasn’t changed, but everything around it has. The people around you, the resources available, the respect, the culture.
It’s all a matter of context too. If you’re the type of elite SWE that can snap their fingers and land offers at any of the FAANGMULA+ companies, then sure it’s much easier to scoff at Meta and say there are many equivalently “interesting” places to work out there.
On the other hand if you’re someone that struggles with leetcode and Meta is the only company of its type that gives you an offer and the rest are cost center companies like the Wells Fargos and Home Depots of the world, then that’s another story.
I had a recruiter reach out to me about some ML positions there earlier this year, and I was sort of interested in it for a bit. They have an applicant portal where they literally have you practice leetcode problems, and are pretty open that you're going to be asked those kinds of questions in the interview.
I had to navigate a dynamic maze involving teleports and boulders to show my leet graphing abilities to join as a test engineer :) Suffice to say I failed. I build test frameworks, manage test network infrastructure, and deploy CI/CD pipelines (and think I'm pretty good at it). I just really suck at leetcode.
Edit: In fact thinking back, they even sent me tips on how to improve my leetcode skills in preparation for the interview! The whole process was completely guided by it.
Leetcode problems doesn't mean leetcode.com problems in a narrow sense (aka copy paste).
It means reasonably complex algorithmic and data structure problems you're supposed to solve by coding under pressure, quickly, in interview conditions.
And if you think that's not happening, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
I suppose I AM confused then. I don't mind someone asking me complex algorithmic problems as long as we're WORKING toward a solution together. To me, leetcode means, "you have 45 minutes to solve these 2 or 3 problems... I'll watch".
Algorithmic thinking is kinda what I do. So solving those problems doesn't feel like a bad proxy for how I might perform on the job.
I interviewed for them. Questions were Front End related. One of the questions were "how could you find a node in an hmtl by id", to which I answered "using the DOM api, a querySelector would do a good job". The interviewer started hypothesising that the querySelector is not available, so we had to start discussing a whole binary traversal algorithm. If that's not leetcode I don't know what qualifies as it
It was hypothesized that querySelector was not available, not that the entire DOM API was not available. However, if we suppose that the entire DOM API was not available, there would no way to access the HTML nodes so no algorithm is going to save you anyway.
Tree structures are very common in software. Needing to traverse them is also common. Sometimes people write utility functions to help you do it (that's where querySelector comes in), but it's really bad to think this knowledge is useless in writing software. You can't even list files recursively in a directory if you don't know how to properly do a tree traversal.
There are many algorithms in "leetcode" style questions that almost never get used in real world software development. Tree traversal is not one of them.
Heck, the whole family of lisp languages are nothing but "(non?)abstract syntax trees". Imagine getting reprimanded by a user named `morelisp` :)
And to be pedantic, since DOM trees are not binary trees, it's not a "binary traversal" problem. I encounter binary trees a lot less than the non-binary counterparts, but the traversal algorithm is basically the same.
I previously worked at Facebook/Instagram for ~10 years and conducted over 1800 interviews (got the t-shirts and hoodie to prove it). leetcode style problems are at the core of the "ninja" interviews. In fact, a lot of leetcode problems are sourced from what Facebook asked before leetcode even existed.
That being said, guidance is to ask 2 medium difficulty questions as opposed to 1 hard one.
Huh, I had an interview at Meta a few months back (which I backed out of) and the (very nice) interviewing prep instructions they provide very clearly stated you should be able to do leet code style questions, preferably two mediums, in an hour. Their interview process felt very organized and prepared overall, although I backed out before actually interviewing with folks.
I was wondering if there is a correlation between hiring engineers who spend their lives memorizing leetcode hard problems and a company's ability to innovate and execute?
Did they really optimize for hiring the top 0.001% of engineers or it's just that the fish is rotten from the top.
It seems to me that the selection process favors Indian and Chinese engineers who are used to cramming for rigorous entrance exams to top universities.
And also Eastern European or ex-USSR countries where highschool STEM curriculum is more difficult than in the west and participation in STEM competitions and olympiads is encouraged for kids.
We had to solve binary and hex division and multiplication on paper for exams and study Dijkstra's algoritm and binary tree traversal in highschool CS. Ugly stuff for a bunch of 16 year olds who just wanted to make Flash games. Really made me hate CS.
>This is not ... hard. It's the same logic as decimal multiplication/division on paper.
Do you really think tests where you gotta solve several divisions and multiplications on paper in hex and binary with no aids under time pressure is approachable for every 11 year old who just starts to learn about CS?
It's good to learn and know how such operations are done, but those tests were the bane of my 11 year old childhood.
I think it just heavily favors new grads, who just spent a year+ studying algorithms. Those with full time jobs have to spend precious hours of free time remembering how to do these.
Well, this just sucks about these jobs interviews. I learned quite a bit during my last job and I'd be happy to show some of these to the interviewer, but instead I'm forced to answer questions that I know have nothing to do with what I'll be dealing with. It's always the same story, it's just exhausting.
> I think it just heavily favors new grads, who just spent a year+ studying algorithms.
Year+ is a fair assessment. A proper Computer Science course(4 years!) is mostly about algorithms. Most of leetcode hard would qualify as warmup exercises for my class.
That was a while ago. Right now? My brain is chock full of architectural stuff, k8s, several programming languages, multiple cloud provider idiosyncrasies, etc etc. Can I do leetcode? Yeah sure. Can I do it during an interview? I've tried recently, bombed spectacularly.
I'll probably have to invest the time prepping properly because there's little choice these days. Like you said, it's using up our precious free time. I'd rather be, I don't know, writing some stuff in Rust so I can add that language to my toolbox.
Please continue to give your honest feedback to employers. I don't do leetcode and I won't proceed with an employer that expects me to interview like that.
I am familiar with Meta's interviewing policy, which proscribes LC "hard" type problems. I don't know the contents of every single interview, obviously. Your interviewer(s) violated explicit policy if you were given LC hards.
In a way does it matter? The interviewers aren’t making the final decisions and the actual hiring committee aren’t stupid and should be able do some basic normalization.
I think it probably matters to the individual interviewees and also matters to the hiring committee because it reduces the quality of the hiring signal.
The problem with companies the size of Meta - and even down to 1/10th the size - is that there's just so many moving parts, it's a day job just to try and figure out how things work and where to implement a change.
It's no wonder that - at least for a while - Google was churning out new products left and right. It allows people to build new stuff instead of have to maintain existing stuff.
Yeah, and the reply they would receive from their friend would be a polite request to touch grass.
People in the real world use instagram and whatsapp all the time without any moral qualms. The main reason facebook as a product is on a decline is because it is simply not interesting to younger people anymore. And even then, FB still manages to occasionally produce features that capture a lot of the audience back. FB marketplace has been a great hit in terms of replacing craigslist.
I am not a Meta employee, and have never been one. But the hate hard-on some people on HN have against Meta just gets really ridiculous at times. We decry echochambers on social media all the time, but are perfectably comfortable falling into ones of our own, without trying to understand how the world outside is really like.
I don't think "touch grass" is an appropriate response to legitimate questions of professional ethics. Comments like this are why I think ethics courses should be mandatory for any CS or engineering degree.
Stating "you should break contact with the recruiter because Meta is causing irreparable damage to society" is not a "legitimate question of professional ethics." It's like saying "you should be rushing the capitol, because democrats are causing irreparable damage to society by stealing the election", and then claiming it was a legitimate question of ethics of democracy. For both of which, the suggestion to touch grass feels pretty appropriate.
I agree with your take on ethics courses being mandatory for CS or engineering college students though. It was mandatory at my college, and I found it to be pretty useful.
EDIT: as pointed out, i incorrectly used "contract" instead of "contact" in the first sentence. Fixed, as it doesn't meaningfully change my point at all. The part relevant to the point I was making was in the "... because Meta is causing irreparable damage to society" half of the sentence.
Who is talking about breaking a contract? I said breaking contact (with recruiters). Your example provides an equivalency so false, I don't really know where to start with it. If I were to alter your analogy it'd be closer to: "Ghost your recruiter, don't work for the Biden Whitehouse" which, if they actually _were_ evil, would be a reasonable thing to say to a friend IMO.
Our startup spends a little bit on Facebook Ads (across FB, Instagram, etc). It's very clear over the past few months that there's trouble in the ads engine. Attribution is a mess, ad efficiency fluctuates randomly, the UI and API are flaky. I don't know whether this is a result of the ios privacy changes, the broader economy affecting ad spend, or internal issues... Maybe a mix. But it's clear that Meta's main revenue engine is a complete mess at the moment.
PS it's not just us. We've seen industry-wide data showing that it's a broader issue.
I don’t know if there’s any merit to this idea, but it seems to me that saturation can become a real problem.
At this point skipping a story or feed ad in Instagram is like a nearly instant reflex for me.
Plus, the programming on the recommendations is laughably amateur for company as resourceful as Meta. If I interact with an ad one time I’ll see the same ad over and over for days or weeks.
Sure, I was curious for a second, but it seems strange that Meta can’t tell that I’m not interested anymore just by monitoring basic usage of the UI.
At the end of the day the advertiser is the one left paying for these repeated ineffective ad impressions.
Somewhat related, I am a little surprised Meta hasn’t tried a Discord-like revenue model where paid annual memberships bestow quality of life and cosmetic social status types of benefits. Even if it wasn’t their main source of revenue it could at least diversify the business and lend some stability to their revenue.
Facebook’s revenue per user is less than $10. Discord charges $99/year for Nitro. I feel like Meta has such a one-track mindset on advertising that it doesn’t consider different revenue models for its businesses.
Meta spends a lot of time talking about the metaverse but Discord is already the metaverse. Why isn’t there a subscription Meta Quest game pass with Discord-like social features? It’s a no-brainer.
Where’s the “pro” paid version of Instagram? Why doesn’t Instagram sell subscription access to things like exclusive camera filters, stickers, and editing tools?
I feel like the company is full of missed business opportunities.
I think GP is talking about a more specific thing, and it's one I experience all the time too: that I'll visit a website briefly one time, by accident, or to satisfy some curiosity, or look up the specifications on something I already own, or to get a link to send to a friend, or whatever other non-purchase reason, and then get shown ads for their thing over and over and over again until the end of time despite the fact that there's a 0% chance that I will ever buy it.
I'm sure it's true that, in the general case, advertisers want to show ads to customers multiple times, but in these particular cases, they shouldn't want to show them to me -- I'm definitely not going to buy the thing, and they're wasting their money, and it seems like Facebook ought to be able to better differentiate between users like me who will definitely not convert and users who might (like GP said: seems like there ought to be detectable patterns in the way I do or don't engage with the content that should signal my lack of interest).
Exactly what I’m saying. I clicked or expanded something out of momentary curiosity. Maybe the ad was provocative or mysterious and I wanted to see what the deal was.
Step two, I get retargeted. That’s fine and expected.
Step three, I get retargeted. Again. And again…and again.
What I don’t understand is how Meta/Instagram can’t figure out at least a little bit sooner that I was clearly just satisfying my curiosity and now every time I see the same ad I scroll by extra fast or otherwise interact in ways that should indicate disinterest.
If you have looked at something once, say there's a 99% chance that you have no further interest in it. But the 1% chance that you are potentially going to buy it after being shown the ad again is still much better odds than showing it to a random person, or a random person who is somehow correlated to the target market.
Even after seeing the ad 50 more times and ignoring it, you are probably still a statistically better lead than someone who has never interacted with the ad. They're not making a strong assumption about you, even though it seems that way. They're making a very weak assumption based on the small number of people who clicked once, hesitated, saw the ad 49 times more, carried on hesitating, and now are finally ready to buy.
My feed is mostly not posts from people I know (for some reason it has started sending me tiktok length clips of standup comedians). Actually it is not so bad, some of the clips are pretty funny, but I could get that sort of content from tiktok or youtube I guess, I just happen to use the facebook app because it is already installed.
Their fundamental advantage was network effect, I guess that is dead now that like 1/5 posts I see is from a friend.
Yep, one of the main reasons I stopped using FB many many years ago was that they made it so hard to view the posts I actually cared about, and gave the user almost no control. It was clear at least a decade ago that FB didn't care about users and just saw them as chattel to squeeze for money.
My understanding is that this is the strategy: the network effect method for choosing what content you want (FB/Insta) is getting beat by the "algorithm determines what you are interested in" method for choosing what content you want, so Facebook is pivoting to the latter.
Maybe Myspace should make a concerted push back into the space Facebook has I guess decided to vacate.
It seems crazy to try and compete with Tiktok on their home turf, they sound to have a pretty competent implementation and Facebook has got to be about as nimble as a barge at this point.
If you work somewhere like Facebook, this is totally unsurprising. There are probably thousands of engineers writing yet-another-framework and working on the 100th re-invention of the wheel for some random internal product that users will never see. The engineers actually solving business problems are almost always understaffed and under-appreciated, hence why the product sucks.
I use it on the browser to check one or two groups and on my phone for events, it's a mess. On the groups I always want to check for the most recent posts because it doesn't have a lot of activity and besides countless things I've tried it always wants to show the posts ordered with its algorithm. It's also like:
post
AD
post
AD
post
AD
I'm used to ads, I grew up watching cartoons and shows on prime time old airwaves TV and listening to music on Top 50 radio shows. This is worse. No other media is as bad as Facebook ad-wise and no other media is worse than what prime TV and radio where in the 90s. They devolved.
Attribution means being able to "attribute" a user and the conversions (eg signups, purchases, etc) they do back to your ad spend. So typically, advertisers want to be able to know that e.g. this ad campaign spent $100, led to 5 clicks, which led to 2 sign-ups and 1 purchase. Before the iOS privacy changes, Facebook could piece all those things together even though the ad might be running either on Facebook or another app, and the conversions are happening in your ad. Aka they could "attribute" the events back to the ad. With the new changes, Facebook can't put all those pieces together as easily, so they can either only do it on an aggregated basis (ie not user-by-user), and/or use probabilistic "modeling" to do attribution. This is good for users, since they are less likely to be tracked, but bad for advertisers who now cannot easily know how effective their ad spend is.
> ... efficiency fluctuating
Let's say one day you spend $1000 and get 100 purchases, that's $10 / purchase. A purchase nets $15 for you, so that is good ad spend. The next day, you spend $1000 and only get 50 purchases, so it's $20 / purchase and you are losing money on your ad spend. These numbers fluctuate a lot more wildly than they did in the past, and it seems to happen randomly, making it hard to commit to spending a certain budget.
This is probably related to attribution, because Facebook uses a lot of Machine Learning to predict who to show an ad to, where to show it, etc based on past conversions. But if they can't really attribute past conversions, it's hard for their Machine Learning model to consistently get results.
iOS privacy has killed facebook advertisements. Meta is dealing with it currently - so are all small businesses who relied on good conversion from their ad targeting that has gone to isht since then.
Apple will probably fill in that void at some point they've got a lock on all that intelligence. I'm curious how long it will take and how they will manage to do it without stepping on privacy toes.
As much as I can’t stand any company involved here, if apple does what you suggest it would be far more offensive than any other supposed antitrust violations alleged over the last few years.
Apple has been around for a while, they I wonder if the company has some institutional 'survival instinct' that's identified growing the ad platform become too much as long-term unhealthy. It is a corrupting influence that makes the consumer into the enemy, after all.
They've also managed to become incredibly huge while somehow mostly dodging the eye of regulatory bodies. Privacy could mess with that track record and I'm sure they are aware of that fact.
A problem I see with FB is that they don't control anything on which they run. They run on stuff from their competitors: it's either Google (Chrome / Android), Microsot (Windows / Edge) or Apple (OS X / Safari / iOS).
Despite the downturn these three behemoths are still enjoying a market cap in the trillion+. Meta is actually down to $360 bn. Meta controls neither the OS nor the browser.
They want to change that by having people switching en masse to the Metaverse but I'm really not sure this is happening.
But Facebook is a platform unto itself. If it was still an enjoyable product that everyone used, and connected to their local interests and groups on, they could still have great, targeted advertising I think. But people don't really seem to use it much anymore in earnest, and their targeting probably relied more on 3rd party scripts across the Internet which are being restricted.
I'm still in the habit of clicking that Facebook bookmark occasionally, and have a few extend circle contacts who regularly post. But nine out of ten times the page does not even update anything beyond the server-side populated parts above the fold. Those "story" or what they are called snapchat(?) clones? They work even less frequently. Sometimes they do, so I assume that it can't really be a systematic failure on my side like some weird browser configuration issue. Apparently Facebook, the website, is crumbling on the inside (technology) as much as on the outside (audience).
> Apparently Facebook, the website, is crumbling on the inside (technology)
This is what makes me really uneasy about React. I feel there is too much cargo cult of a technology that doesn’t even work for their creators in the first place.
> They want to change that by having people switching en masse to the Metaverse but I'm really not sure this is happening.
The tech isn't even close to there yet.
Current gen VR tech demos sparks the imagination, and it's definitely great for people that want to like it... But that's not even close to good enough for mass adoption.
Their teased prototypes look like a solid upgrade, but it's still not going to be enough.
Mobile procedures just don't have enough graphics power yet and the one's we do have consume too much power. We're missing several hardware breakthrough before mass adoption becomes likely from my perspective as a VR headset owner.
It's probably gonna happen eventually, but not necessarily with current tech.
Meta might succeed if it stays on the ball and keeps pushing for centuries, but i don't think it's management will do so.
Centuries? I haven't taken a close look at VR (though I'm flirting with buying a headset soon, just for kicks...) but I'd always assumed it was more like 10-25 years away.
What are the hardware breakthroughs that you think would do it?
They burned through an ungodly amount of money. There was a headset that they released four years ago - it was a flop. Similar deal to the hololens, first generaion aimed at developers. Recently they've pivoted and there is a second generation headset announced that is aimed at business users.
Are you going to be willing to install a brain implant from Facebook? Dear God. It's like something out of a dystopian movie. No amount of money will convince me to do something like this, especially coming from Facebook, but any corporation really.
Very light AR glasses can be an interesting proposition but they will not provide the VR immersive experience.
I'm not sure what people expect from VR but it's not Ready Player One and will not be for a very long time. However, playing Half Life Alyx is quite phenomenal even today on current hardware.
Only thing I can think is that GP is making a sports reference (1 century = 100 runs in cricket) a la "home run" being used to mean a smashing success.
This reminds me of what Apple did just before Web came to the fore. They had something called HyperCard. Then they had something called "Agents" for automating your online activities. But neither of those platforms succeeded.
honestly i want to know, what need is there for it? Why should i wear something on my head? what advantage does it have on computers/ handheld devices? what can i do on a VR headset that I can't already do on a computer or handheld device?
First of all, no one gets car sick while driving - already a major difference to VR. Secondly, most people who can get car sick can avoid it by sitting in the front row and looking only straight ahead.
Finally, even for people who get hopelessly car sick as passengers no matter what they do, the advantage of a fast safe private ride often outweighs the discomfort - especially since no one is spending more than 1h in a car more often than a few times a year. It is very hard to imagine what application could make VR give even close to the amount of utility that cars give you.
The biggest question isn't even whether its technology is ready. The biggest question is WHY?
Why as a consumer, do I want to wear something on my head? especially since, handheld phones are already way more engaging than I need. Are VR headsets just another entertainment device (something I have way too much of already) or will it facilitate work from home?
You know, I've been wondering what could possibly possess Meta to be so, "FUCK YEAH, ALL IN MF'ERS!!!" about the metaverse for a while now. This actually makes a lot of sense; companies control the platforms we are on, which then determines how we must operate (read: which prevents us from invasively monitoring you as much as we'd like), so why not control the full stack as people close more doors on us?
I still think they are going to fail spectacularly there, but I suppose I can't blame them for trying.
Perhaps they shouldn't have bailed on making phones. Android phone arena is still very messy and they could just...have good hardware and a slick skin on Android and probably make a go of it.
I know I'm armchairing the devil so to speak but I think this would have been a good long term play for them, but I imagine their expertise at the time was antithetical to hardware.
Meta/Microsoft/Amazon all did not want to plow the billions of dollars and years it takes to develop hardware that can compete with iPhone and Android.
They bet that they did not need to, but unfortunately for Meta, looks like they should have.
The same people that still use Facebook. Which is to say, we could probably find a couple of billion people who couldn't give two rats asses about all that, and just want to respond to Aunt Nancy's political rants[1] in a space where everyone can see.
[1] Or watch Feel Good Videos ABOUT People Spontaneously HELPING Poor ANIMALS Trapped In A PREDICAMENT [2].
[2] That the people in question may or may not have put them into.
I genuinely despise the people that make [1][2] for monetisation purposes and ad dumping. Intentionally torturing and starving small animals for likes. Fuck.
I would've loved a basic FB integrated tablet for my parents. Something that had easy video chat for the kids. This would have worked really well with the friend graph. My options both on Android and iOS leave a lot to be desired.
They all DID plow billions of dollars into phone efforts, but they just couldn't muscle their way into a competitive position
They could all definitely manufacture Android devices and hold some Android sub-market share, but that business isn't interesting to them. They wanted to control a platform, and when it was clear that wasn't going to happen (after spending many billions), they gave up.
Clearly they needed to plow more billions and years. They are competing with company that has spent a decade+ developing a retail store presence as well as iterating over and over on their product.
But Microsoft and Google and Meta were not interested in “in person support” or business that does not scale, and part of the price they pay for that is to be gimped by Apple at a moments notice and watch your market cap dive.
I think Google showed with Windows Phone that they were very much willing to sacrifice a few users of their huge platforms in order to sabotage any competitor platforms entirely (e.g. refusing them access to the YouTube API, and refusing to develop a YT app for WP). I think that once Amazon and MS stopped developping their phone OSs, the message was well and truly sent: you either make a Google phone, or you try to make a popular phone without easy access to YouTube and GMail and Google Maps (obviously, Apple was already too big by the time Android really got going for Google to have any chance of hurting Apple more than themselves with this same strategy).
I have a Quest 2 and It's sitting inside a box behind the PC inside a Nike shoebox and when I try to use it, I need to basically go through a whole process all over again. A factory reset as it were because something to do with facebook account wasn't needed... but then it was needed so i made a fake account... something to do with I don't need facebook anymore... something to do with a meta account.... something to do with I needed to switch on dev mode to stop it annoying me about guardian when I want to use it on the sofa... something to do with installing some kind of app on my phone to sync to it to make it work... something about my occulus dev account is invalid... something about....
I can't use the device.
If I dig into the box, and drag it out, I need to deal with all of this stuff. I want to play for example Superhot, but I have no idea how to even reinstall or even if I need to reinstall because I need to login with something above "all over again".
Fucking trash.
The "Metaverse" is just a bad joke regardless if it worked perfectly, but all of this crud means that I can't even be bothered picking up the actual device.
> A problem I see with FB is that they don't control anything on which they run. They run on stuff from their competitors: it's either Google (Chrome / Android), Microsot (Windows / Edge) or Apple (OS X / Safari / iOS).
You do realize you just described the vast majority of all tech companies that exist today, right?
The only other tech giant that is a trillion dollar company is Amazon, and they own a lot of platforms. Beyond those 4 there are no other trillion dollar tech cos. The cutoff is pretty clear and the field is small.
The high price of Apple products in markets like India was such a great targeting filter for D2C products by itself. There was a time in 2020-21 when you could literally throw any random ad for a premium product, choose iPhone users as your target, and land wild conversions.
It defies description why they aren't bringing context-sensitive ads back. They didn't follow you all around the Internet, they were relevant in any given context, and you felt less need to block them out mentally.
I was more likely to click on context-sensitive ads. Most targeted ads I see these days are for products that I've already bought in the past few weeks, which just boggles my mind.
Edit: Even today, I'm still seeing ads for a subwoofer that I bought back in early August. Good going, Meta.
I bet that showing ads based on context is somehow limited to people being in that context (i.e. in a specific website for instance), while being able to draw an audience from the entirety of Facebook users (in the billions) is more profitable.
> Apple will probably fill in that void at some point
a) what if they don't? Why should they?
b) I would lose a lot of trust in Apple if they did. I don't buy iOS devices because I trust Apple Ads better. I buy them because I can avoid ads better and my privacy doesn't get shredded in the process.
Apple already is filling that void. If you run your ads on third-party networks, you are beholden to Apple's privacy rules. But if you run Apple Search Ads through, Apple itself, a lot of the same rules don't apply and you get targeting and attribution back.
A lot of advertisers are thus shifting their ad spend into Apple.
Yes, their inventory is smaller at the moment, but they also show ads in News and Stock apps (note that those ads are personalized and don't have an ATT prompt by default.. so Apple apps don't have to play by the same rules as others). My guess is they will continue to expand inventory to other Apple apps (eg Maps, etc), but whether they try to build a full-fledged ad platform (where you can use Apple to buy ads in 3rd party apps) is yet to be seen.. they'd definitely have to overcome a backlash if they did that.
They will because they are a for-profit company and there's profit to be had. Apple will likely find a strong marketing angle for their Ad network (won't be the first time they've tried).
Selling hardware is a great business but it gets saturated eventually. The next move for eternal growth is selling services on top of said hardware.
> I would lose a lot of trust in Apple if they did. I don't buy iOS devices because I trust Apple Ads better. I buy them because I can avoid ads better and my privacy doesn't get shredded in the process.
Apple already has a lot of data about you. Consider that they own both the hardware and software experience on an iPhone. I'm having a hard time seeing an alternative here unless you have the time to manage your own phone OS...
> Wouldn't that be a massive antitrust issue?
Only if someone does something about it. I assume G and Meta's lawyers are already working on arguments.
They still dominate the Indian market simply because TikTok is banned here.
While I don’t undermine the spying potential of TikTok, the ban was strangely timed - soon after a huge investment from Facebook in India’s biggest company (and one with tremendous lobbying power). Only a handful of Chinese apps were banned, even though majority of devices running them were Chinese as well (and went unbanned).
Facebook very well would have lost the massive Indian market as well without the TikTok ban.
This hasn't gone into effect yet. When it does, it could expand Meta's ability to track users. If Apple is tracking users for ads, then they must extend that ability to third parties like Meta.
I haven't done much with Facebook ads since 2019, but back then the UI was a flaky, buggy mess. It was pretty terrible to work with. At one point they had a "Power Editor" and then a simpler ads interface. They combined these into one unified tool and it was pretty rough.
Our CPIs have been absurd ever since the privacy changes. Meta is fucked and I don’t think people realize how much of an effect this is going to have on the entire internet.
There are large downstream effects the iOS privacy changes are having on mobile advertising and the viability of companies that rely on mobile programmatic to bring people in the door.
Some kinds of businesses did. But the current version of a tech startup didn't. No, the world won't end, but we could be looking at significant economic changes.
Apple is a private company, they decided to limit the current mechanism through which adtech tracked people, and if people dislike it they can switch to more advertising-friendly devices. What I like about the current situation is everything is done freely - no law was passed to make Apple do it, nor make Meta use it.
As consumers start understanding exactly how adtech works - and such education took decades - they are freely choosing devices that limit tracking, and when given the option to opt-out, are opting out at extremely high numbers. This tells you something about what consumers want.
Businesses would be more viable if they learned to market through mechanisms that were less distasteful to consumers.
It's a free market, someone can create a pro-advertising phone if they think it will be successful. Plenty of Android phones are chock full of terrible adware.
It's tough for businesses that thrived on the privacy-compromising features of early 21st century adtech. They can adapt or die.
>As consumers start understanding exactly how adtech works
I can assure you that consumers do not. Even someone in this comment section of a technical form didn't know what attribution is which is an important part of how adtech works. Even from an extremely high level the prevalence of the phrase "XYZ is selling your data" despite that not happening is a clear sign that most people just parrot what they hear than actually understand. There has been a large amount of scaremongering about how bad this tracking is to people. This scaremongering drives more people to opt out than people opting out who actually understand how it works.
>Businesses would be more viable if they learned to market through mechanisms that were less distasteful to consumers.
That is not true. If the cost of that alternative marketing costs more than what you will make from doing it then the business is not viable.
I think this is missing a lot of nuances of digital advertising and the environment that business now operate in. The two major types of ads that used to exist were local and brand. Local is pointless for vast majority of today's digital businesses. Brand is very expensive from both a production and spend perspective, it is only suitable for already large businesses, there is also a lot of research that suggest it is very ineffective in actually generating sales for B2C.
Third option was to take out ads in a specialist publication to reach an audience that would mostly be aligned with your product (ie. business that makes chess boards taking out an ad in a chess magazine). This is probably the closest equivalent of targeted advertising today.
The barrier to entry for retail has dropped ridiculously with Shopify, allowing for niche and specialised retailers in a way that was previously not feasible. Acquiring new customers is still the hardest thing for a business to do, always has been and always will be, without the ability to reach new customers and connect with the audience who is interested in the businesses niche that is all dead in the water.
Take a look at the top 20 advertisers, by total amount spent. You'll see, it's almost entirely large companies that don't calculate any kind of ROI and thus are extremely insensitive to CPIs. Companies like Pepsi and Nike don't and can't calculate ROI, they just want to spend a certain number of billion dollars on ads, even if it's just to prevent competitors from having those ad slots.
Now businesses, that do depend on a positive ROI on ad spend, in order to compete and survive: they are F*ked, sadly.
As a user, FB is a hot mess rn so much so that I'm forced to switch to other apps. 8/10 posts are either sponsored or "suggested" by some random page. It's like watching 30 mins of ad to watch 1 min of video on youtube. When I instictively open the app, the first 10 posts (ads) help me in breaking the habit.
I wonder what the effects of Meta failing would have on society? I can’t think of competing social network for people to migrate to. Would topic forums see a rise in popularity again or would sites like Reddit draw in some of those users.
Nothing. I'm pretty sure Meta could disappear from the face of the earth tomorrow and after a week of boredom, people would realise that life is actually much much better without it. (I've been off all Meta services since 3 years).
> or would sites like Reddit draw in some of those users
probably. I get the impression reddit is doing more marketing to non tech people, and more people I know have said positive stuff about reddit out of nowhere
but also... I feel like this is unrelated, but reddit has seriously gone downhill since what it was in like 2015. It's a good idea but the users make it insufferable
This is a well trodden path. They cannot grow forever, nor can the economy. But investors will expect/want monotonic growth. In profits if not in revenue
I expect Meta will be closing labs in the USA and opening them in other, cheaper, English speaking companies.
> “I had hoped the economy would have more clearly stabilized by now..” Zuckerberg said.
Zuck is blaming the economy, but Meta's real problem is that Apple tightened iOS privacy. Meta had built a business on tracking people, and when iOS tightened privacy, Meta could not target ads as effectively as before.
Metaverse is an interesting idea, but they're too quick to hail it as the feature of the company imo. It just looks like an expensive, boring, video game right now.
It's really not though, nor is it an original one. There are real people with real problems in the world and we've seen over and over that increasingly virtualizing our interactions, with a few exceptions, is a great way of kicking those problems down the road.
An idea can be interesting and still be a huge waste of time. I don't think it'll end well for Meta. It'll be super interesting to see how it plays out. I think we might end up with some sweet VR tech, I just don't think it's going to give FB the kind of business they think it will.
I think he's deluding himself a little. I think VR is going to be a niche product for a long, long time. AR, if cool enough, could maybe catch on. But it needs to be as easy as putting on shades.
The economy is an issue, but the "fault" is not in the economy or the CEO in that there is no fault. A business is not responsible for retaining employees even if the economy is strong. If we prescriptively believe that people ought have money to maintain a basic standard of living then we should have the government provide this service using public money and not private ad-funded money.
It is modern corporate style to have CEO's shed tears (sometimes literally) to show that their cold calculations actually have love behind them, but this is all just PR. We should recognize Mark's statement for what it is — standard corporate PR. And we should offer such statements as much respect as standard corporate verbiage deserves and not get into the substance of the statements as there typically is none.
Not the only problem. Zuck's betting the farm on VR, which is sucking up resources and attention. Even if it reaches critical adoption, how many years before it starts generating true profit?
If he ends up being right, we'll all praise him as a great visionary. They have the means for what it would take. But since I'm not a great visionary, I'll just go on the record with: no chance, there's no real addressable market there...
What he meant was "I had hoped _our_stock_price_ would have more clearly stabilized by now..."
They over-hired low[er] quality employees (by his own admission) when the stock exploded in 2020. Now they'll do anything to avoid official layoffs to save face.
I wonder what freeze means in this context (paywalled so couldn't see if there was additional context) because I just received a third followup email from a recruiter at Meta..
- display ads: google search, youtube, instagram, fb feed
- display a "buy" button: google search, youtube, instagram
The only "new" products they don't shutdown after a year are products that allows them to gather more data / show more ads / get more "buy" clicks. Everything else get terminated no matter what
I think we work at the same little company. Tbh, we are already kind of at 5., some divisions are getting shut down and people have n months to find a new team. It's a game of musical chairs.
While others find him inconsiderate, I appreciate that Zuckerberg is at least not all corpspeak. Too bat he bet on the losing horse with the Metaverse and now has to stay in until either it succeeds or he gets sacked.
Perhaps Zuckerberg should be paid significantly less? Perhaps Facebook employees should fight back? Like protest or leak controversial information, especially since Facebook is in the data hoarding business?
But, stuff like this should make Facebook employees angry. Zuckerberg is not a person to envy.
> But, stuff like this should make Facebook employees angry. Zuckerberg is not a person to envy.
It's a wonder he hasn't been pushed out yet. I'm pretty sure he's holding enough stock to prevent it from happening, but you have to wonder what kind of internal pressure there is in the Facebook C suite right now
Is it known whether this sort of hiring freeze affects all levels? I have a friend who's in-progress for a staff role at Meta and I had heard in the past that staff was often "immune to hiring freezes."
Imagine being of IC7+ caliber and voluntarily deciding to jump on this sinking ship. I doubt such a person exists. Might be an opportunity to upsell yourself into an IC7[+] offer, though.
But meta is very stock compensation heavy so you are betting on the company stock at least not dropping considerably like the people that joined in august of last year at a $350 per a share price.
they've been over zealous with their hiring for many years, this was bound to happen during economic uncertainty. tack on competition from tiktok, failing metaverse, privacy and political related scandals, and there you have it: a sinking ship
Facebook (Meta) cannot innovate. Their growth since inception is almost exclusively through acquisitions. Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus. The core Facebook product is arguably worse today than it was 15 years ago. Meta's response to new market entrants is to just copy their features, and when they do attempt to innovate it's just comically off-base (Metaverse). This entire "Metaverse" play is so ridiculous it's deep into meme territory.
Meta should have plainly seen the writing on the wall with regard to their data collection and privacy practices but either wouldn't, or more likely couldn't, pivot to new areas.
And now Zuck is here saying this hiring freeze is due to the economic situation. Peak comedy. The reality is Meta has no answer for TikTok, BeReal, Apple/Google privacy changes, or whatever else is coming to the market next.
I wish Meta nothing but the worst, but I'm sorry for any unfortunate souls who chose to work their and will be out of a job.
> Facebook (Meta) cannot innovate. Their growth since inception is almost exclusively through acquisitions. Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus.
Innovation at this point != success
Just look at Oracle... they're still alive and doing OK
They don't need to at this point. They have FB, IG, WhatsApp, and Messenger
That's already a lot to begin with, they could've just coasted and they'd be fine
But instead they have their idiot CEO creating PR nightmare after PR nightmare (just look at this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8q2BQOGRGE and tell me he isn't a liability) and funneling billions into what's going to be the biggest business mistake of this decade
Fair point with regard to Oracle, but I’m not sure it’s reasonable to compare an enterprise B2B software company with a consumer business such as Meta.
I’d additionally argue that Meta is functionally coasting by way of flailing about on useless products. FB is flatlining, and IG is getting eaten alive by TikTok and BeReal. Oculus is seemingly healthy, and WhatsApp has a dominant and entrenched position. However, what is WhatsApp and Oculus worth if FB and IG fail?
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 229 ms ] threadMy guess is Google/Alphabet will do the same, as they have too high a proportion of people doing things that are neither basic research or contributing to revenue in any way. You can see how that can happen when you have an unconstrained gusher of money. There's effectively zero feedback. However given the weakness of their management (see: gusher of money + lack of focus) it's unlikely that the cuts will make any difference either way. Probably many good people will simply take a buy out and then go get another interesting job.
Netfix? Given their culture and their market problems one could imagine it, but their culture seems to have steered them into trying to fight back. So probably not a big wave, just some trimming, as they have already done.
As for the rest of maAMA-n? They appear to be doing fine; Amazon's retail challenges are more than made up by AWS. Apple and MS are trundling along as if nothing is happening in the macroenvironment (and they each have 40+ years to have worked out their systems).
Over 200bn the last time I saw a figure (90bn in cash, the rest invested).
https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-funds/sectors/sp500-compa...
Apple -
https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/18/23268953/apple-slow-hirin...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-16/apple-lay...
Microsoft
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-20/microsoft...
https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-scoop-22
Amazon
https://www.protocol.com/newsletters/sourcecode/amazon-slows...
(doot doo do doo doot)
Therefore your suggestion sounds great!
How about: Microsoft Alphabet Netflix Apple Meta Amazon Nvidia Alibaba
"Well, Joe, it's funny you ask..."
Think about all the startups who rely on AWS, Apple computers, and Facebook ads. What happens when they all die?
The tech bull run is over, and we'll find out where the bodies lie soon.
It's really weird how many people seem to _want_ the tech industry to just wither and die. It's unlikely and unrealistic. There may be a sharp correction, but it's unrealistic to think that the behemoths with a moat are going anywhere.
We don't even know the market demand for these products because cheap money has made everyone a startup founder, and every company pivoted to providing a "tech" solution when it might not have been economically viable or provided any profit.
You wrote: “Since most tech/saas companies sell/support other saas companies, they all go down.”
Meta/Goog are (eng staff wise) oversized for their output. Both of their leaderships aren't leading very well.
Despite the hype and capabilities offered, none of the big players have find ways to use their AI assets. That's a poor indicator of their future. You can almost smell the disruption coming..
They don’t sell tech. They use tech. They sell ads.
I do agree that the bull run for companies that sell tech will subside, maybe over correcting in the short term.
I don't think there is anything substantial here to suggest this is anything other than a normal recession and even if this was like the dotcom bubble, these companies aren't like dotcom era startups. They're massive behemoths intertwined with the fabric of American society, not to mention their warchests make most other companies blush.
Then I'm guessing you haven't been paying much attention to anything.
Have you seen what's happening in the bond market these days? Looked at the insane actions the BoE is taking coupled with their insane tax policy? Have you seen the rising dollar are you aware the threat that makes to the entire global credit system?
This is literally just getting started.
I was not aware of the US bond market crumbling, and having a quick read it doesn’t seem to be, it seems to be a consequence of the fed raising rates which will obviously not continue indefinitely.
To be honest it still seems like a normal recession but with a bunch of hyperbolic news headlines attached.
Too much cheap money and a grow at any costs mentality has lead to exactly this is problem where every tech company is very tightly coupled with every other tech company.
I'm in the B2B space for one of the many non-profitable, recently IPO'd companies. As far as companies goes, this one is pretty sane. Healthy growth, a product that makes sense, thoughtful leadership. However when I look at our customers the vast majority are small tech startups, many of which will obviously cease to exist in a down turn.
When I look at our spending, it's mostly to other larger tech companies, those big tech companies everyone wants to work for.
But those small startups, that have weird products that don't make sense, price sensitive customers, unsustainable growth and crazy leadership, they make up a huge amount of our revenue. When they start to collapse, we'll have to downsize, both in headcount and in services we pay for. And we won't be alone.
On top of that, I look at my own spending. My other tech friends and I have no problem paying what would have been crazy amounts for services like Door Dash, or a constant stream of slightly over price but so convenient stuff from Amazon. Why not subscribe to another streaming services, it's only $10/month. So many of these direct to consumer companies mostly exist because of highly paid techworkers that have more cash than they need.
I get laid off I'll just pick up my food myself, I'm not going to be ordering everything of Amazon, I'm cancelling all but my most active subscriptions.
There are a lot of positive feedbacks in the current tech ecosystem what will continue to be triggered and continue to bring down the massive, massive tech bubble we're in.
Most likely; these services will evolve into a format where it is financially more viable - which might even allow them to reach larger audiences.
Ideally, this should happen in a slow fashion (which it seems to be happening). A sudden crash would be more chaotic, but on the long term I doubt we have much to worry about as a sector; there'll still be plenty of jobs for tech workers.
Facebook would then change their motto in 2014 to "move fast with stable infrastructure" [0] - don't know how well that's worked out for them since.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_Platforms#cite_ref-43
TikTok is strong, but realistically will be banned across the west next couple years b/c of security problems.
You might hate Instagram, and that's very understandable, but it's going to be fine.
TikTok won't be banned because US will force it to relocate all their relevant servers to US and hand in US citizens' data to US agencies. And realistically speaking TikTok is no different than Microsoft, Google and Facebook; instead all data going to one superpower it flows to another and majority of this data is garbage that's inefficiently used to target you with personalized ads. Personal data is mostly garbage like I said but data about specific groups and overall population might be more valuable and important taking in consideration economic competition and arms race between US and China.
Meta gets the overwhelming majority (97.7%) of their revenue from advertising[1]. Their business model is completely reliant on using user data to sell highly targeted ads to sellers. While most consumers don't actually care what corporations do with their data, governments have been starting to crack down on the types of data that can be collected, and what it can be used for, especially with GDPR in the EU. The less data Meta can collect, the worse their targeted advertising will be, and fewer sellers will be willing to pay - or pay as much - for ads on their platforms. As it is, many companies are moving more towards influencer sponsorship for advertising, cutting platforms like Instagram out of the cost entirely.
The problem is that all of Meta's eggs are in one basket, and that basket's bound to drop. Most other big tech companies have more diverse revenue sources, and so are more robust.
That being said, I disagree with the premise - Netflix is probably going to the first FAANG company to fold.
[1] https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...
Why would Netflix go out of business? Are they overly burdened by debt?
Plus they don't seem to be able to make a hit show of the kind that gets subscriptions, just a lot of not too terrible content.
So, buy one of those "disney classics" bundles and you are good for a long chunk of time. Netflix covers the adults.
That's my feeling at least, I don't like a single adult show from disney.
Maybe you could opt in for political calls if they pay you..
Funnily enough though, I heard once you join as a Front-end engineer, you are pretty much a regular SWE and can join any team and work on any tech, even backend/systems.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33025666
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33025573
I didn't practice that much since I hate wasting time on useless tasks, and the interviewer literally told me to just leetcode and read the interview book. I asked him a bunch of web questions and he had no fucking clue, all he did was leetcode and interview every year.
The questions the human is asking you come from a big question bank and a lot of it is listed on LeetCode under the meta company tag because people leak them.
People use Leetcode to practice for those interviews, they don't use the leetcode site in the interview
I mean, now I'm just here to watch the downvotes pile on....
Designing url-shortner is no different than edit distance.
Though it worked out for me in the end, but I was definitely annoyed for a day or two.
I told her no thank you and hung up.
With Google it's actually been a pattern. Interviewed for them and passed HC three times, but each time I couldn't bring myself to work for them given how bored everyone looked.
They must be really strange folks. I can't imagine 1) a company who would propose such a thing to a (potential) employee, 2) a person who would agree to that. Seriously, WTF.
Blue pill: I am passionate about connecting people
Red pill: Money is nice, good people and low stress job
Do you seriously struggle to think of possible reasons for why someone would want to work for Meta? Something like "high pay, interesting/difficult challenges and problems to work on, large scale rarely found elsewhere, and lots of learning opportunities (including loads of great engineers to learn from)" never crossed your mind?
Not saying that those were the reasons OP used to make their choice, could have been plenty others. But given there are so many obvious possible reasons, the question in the context of the original comment feels just off.
P.S. I am neither current nor a former Meta employee. It is just jarring to see reddit-tier flamebait discourse in HN threads.
Yes, I struggle to think of a good reason to work for such a harmful company as Meta. People usually don't land there because of a desperate need for money, which would probably be one of the very few acceptable reasons for joining that company.
And why should my question be in good faith? Why should we not call out people who cheerfully join organizations that pose a threat to our future, and show no civic responsibility?
WhatsApp is an extremely useful product in my life. Instagram is nice for keeping up to date with some friends I don't get a chance to hangout in-person with often, as well as following some small local artist and museum pages. I dont care for FB as a product anymore, but pre-pandemic it was great for helping organize events with my friends. Oculus Quest 2 is a product I use daily and enjoy.
Most people outside of a subset of HN boiling in their own echochamber consider a lot of those products as useful in their lives, and will just give you the look of "huh, sounds interesting, i will look into it later. Oh, just remembered I had an appointment in an hour, welp gotta go, see ya later" if you try to give them that "harmful" spiel.
> And why should my question be in good faith?
Because that's what people come to HN for. If I wanted bad faith takes galore, I would need to go no further than reddit.
> Why should we not call out people who cheerfully join organizations that pose a threat to our future, and show no civic responsibility?
Because that's just your opinion. And it is sliding into QAnon-level justifications for using arguments like "why should we wear masks, when they pose a threat to our freedoms and the way of life!" and "why should we not storm the capitol, it is a civic responsibility to free ourselves from the shadow cabal's tyrrany and threat to our future!".
I don't agree with those QAnon takes, so I hope you realize that not everyone universally agrees with your takes either. And not because they are being paid by Meta or were "brainwashed".
It seems you also struggle to understand that the majority of the world does not consider them to be a harmful company, and do not agree with your assessment of it.
Anti-disclaimer: I do not work for FAANG, nor have I. I also never had a FB/Instagram account. I'm not fond of Facebook, but I can see other people's perspectives.
Then you aren't actually asking to learn. Instead you are judging the poster. That's a thing you can do, but couching it in a question is terrible forum etiquette.
You only asked him his reason, so you could attack him for it.
Just go and say what you really meant, instead of pretending like you had anything to contribute in the first place.
That way, at least the reasonable people can see what you wrote, and hopefully get you deplatformed.
This is the part that tells me that maybe you are a bit out of touch with the general public.
Go to any college campus or talk to any student in a good CS program in the US. Meta is going to be on the list of some of the most sought after companies to get an internship or a fresh grad offer at. People post glowing humblebrag posts on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/TikTok/LinkedIn/etc. when they get a job offer from Meta, for their friends and followers to see. I see it on my own feeds not that rarely, and often from people I went to college with a while ago.
I cannot really feel the same level of excitement about a job like that to share it with others in a similar way. But you finding it "surprising that a person would share [that they got a job at Meta] publicly at this point in the company's history", as if it was something they would be ashamed about and attempt hiding, is somewhat telling.
What warrants deplatforming is your straight up admitance that you had nothing to contribute, were not acting in good faith, and were just asking a question to attack someone.
Just say it with your chest. That way people can judge for themselves what the heck it is you are doing.
My question was not made in bad faith, but insinuated to be a bad faith question by a different user, though as I said, I do understand the people who directly call out Meta employees, which I did not do here.
It is you and your peer who attacked the question, brought up conspiracy theories and called for deplatforming. So if you continue perhaps I'll be the one to reach out to mods. I have every damn right to ask someone on HN why they would work for Meta, without expecting intimidation from other users.
And yes, I continue to be surprised by people who would join Meta given all the shady and illegal things they've been doing over the years. So maybe one of you could give an honest answer, one that does not involve an attack. Maybe they weren't fully aware of Meta's issues, or people there generally don't care about these problems? That is what I was trying to understand.
This is you basically admitting that it was all in bad faith in the first place, because, it is an attempt to justify it, by effectively questioning why your question should be asked in good faith in the first place.
For example an Amazon employee could be bothered by their union related question being perceived as critique, while also seeing no issue with someone condemning Amazon for their illegal union busting, and general disregard for the safety and well being of their warehouse staff.
Ok, so you agree that you should not ask questions in bad faith, and then when you later said "And why should my question be in good faith?", well that was a dumb question.
Glad I finally got you to the point of saying that we shouldn't ask people questions in bad faith, to attack them.
Just say what mean, and don't do this roundabout way of attacking people, with a flame-bait question.
And if you already agree that we should not ask people bad faith questions, then you saying "And why should my question be in good faith?" is bad faith itself, because you already know that we shouldn't do that.
Find a less harmful employer instead of projecting your insecurities into someone's question, and trying to silence critique of any kind to ease your conscience.
Cool, so as I suspected, you support engaging in bad faith, and asking bad faith questions.
Just say that from the very beginning if that is your opinion. Not sure why you would do this song and dance of denial, if this is just what you believe.
Awesome! Got you to admit to it them! Now don't start crying when people accuse you of supporting asking questions in bad faith.
Just say "Yep, that is a totally valid thing to accuse me of supporting. I agree that you are correct in saying that I have no problem with asking questions in bad faith!".
You could have avoided all of this, if you just said that from the beginning.
Scale, by now, is surely an operations matter. If they're still having to innovate to perform at their current scale, what the hell have they been doing? In other words, aside from the VR distraction, what interesting challenges remain at Meta?
I know they have to rebuild their ad platform since Apple devastated it. But is "convincing people to look at advertisements" really still an interesting challenge? That's the point of view I don't understand, and would like to!
Is it selfish? Perhaps. And maybe Meta will fall out of the pantheon of top tech companies at some point, but for now they’re still there.
The projects in their domain is definitely more interesting than slogging through yet another Generic Line of Business Project at Generic Tech Is A Cost Center Company where the vast majority of SWEs work.
Stipulated the rest of it -- what's the engineering challenge?
Say for example using advanced engineering techniques to optimize existing processes to achieve a 0.1% speedup. That alone could save a couple million dollars with Meta's scale. And it's only possible with the kind of scale they have.
And of course outsiders wouldn't even notice such a thing.
But to counter that, again, what’s the interesting or exciting engineering challenges at the various mundane companies where the vast majority of SWEs work at?
Having worked at such “boring” companies, but recently transferred to an “exciting” company in the same tier as Meta, I can say the fundamental concept of my projects or work hasn’t changed, but everything around it has. The people around you, the resources available, the respect, the culture.
It’s all a matter of context too. If you’re the type of elite SWE that can snap their fingers and land offers at any of the FAANGMULA+ companies, then sure it’s much easier to scoff at Meta and say there are many equivalently “interesting” places to work out there.
On the other hand if you’re someone that struggles with leetcode and Meta is the only company of its type that gives you an offer and the rest are cost center companies like the Wells Fargos and Home Depots of the world, then that’s another story.
Edit: In fact thinking back, they even sent me tips on how to improve my leetcode skills in preparation for the interview! The whole process was completely guided by it.
It means reasonably complex algorithmic and data structure problems you're supposed to solve by coding under pressure, quickly, in interview conditions.
And if you think that's not happening, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
Algorithmic thinking is kinda what I do. So solving those problems doesn't feel like a bad proxy for how I might perform on the job.
However, how often do you come up with high performance, close to optimal algorithms, on your own, within 45 minutes?
How often do you implement heaps and such as part of your day job, versus using standard libraries or common ones?
It’s optimising for the 1%.
There are many algorithms in "leetcode" style questions that almost never get used in real world software development. Tree traversal is not one of them.
Heck, the whole family of lisp languages are nothing but "(non?)abstract syntax trees". Imagine getting reprimanded by a user named `morelisp` :)
And to be pedantic, since DOM trees are not binary trees, it's not a "binary traversal" problem. I encounter binary trees a lot less than the non-binary counterparts, but the traversal algorithm is basically the same.
By the second: Holy shit go read a book. Please.
That being said, guidance is to ask 2 medium difficulty questions as opposed to 1 hard one.
Did they really optimize for hiring the top 0.001% of engineers or it's just that the fish is rotten from the top.
We had to solve binary and hex division and multiplication on paper for exams and study Dijkstra's algoritm and binary tree traversal in highschool CS. Ugly stuff for a bunch of 16 year olds who just wanted to make Flash games. Really made me hate CS.
I was solving leetcode-adjacent problems for the entire last year of high school in preparation for the final exam though.
This is not ... hard. It's the same logic as decimal multiplication/division on paper.
> study Dijkstra's algoritm and binary tree traversal in highschool CS
That's more like it!
Do you really think tests where you gotta solve several divisions and multiplications on paper in hex and binary with no aids under time pressure is approachable for every 11 year old who just starts to learn about CS?
It's good to learn and know how such operations are done, but those tests were the bane of my 11 year old childhood.
Year+ is a fair assessment. A proper Computer Science course(4 years!) is mostly about algorithms. Most of leetcode hard would qualify as warmup exercises for my class.
That was a while ago. Right now? My brain is chock full of architectural stuff, k8s, several programming languages, multiple cloud provider idiosyncrasies, etc etc. Can I do leetcode? Yeah sure. Can I do it during an interview? I've tried recently, bombed spectacularly.
I'll probably have to invest the time prepping properly because there's little choice these days. Like you said, it's using up our precious free time. I'd rather be, I don't know, writing some stuff in Rust so I can add that language to my toolbox.
It's no wonder that - at least for a while - Google was churning out new products left and right. It allows people to build new stuff instead of have to maintain existing stuff.
But it might depend on whether they were pre-allocated to a team (which I understand is very rare, but it does happen).
People in the real world use instagram and whatsapp all the time without any moral qualms. The main reason facebook as a product is on a decline is because it is simply not interesting to younger people anymore. And even then, FB still manages to occasionally produce features that capture a lot of the audience back. FB marketplace has been a great hit in terms of replacing craigslist.
I am not a Meta employee, and have never been one. But the hate hard-on some people on HN have against Meta just gets really ridiculous at times. We decry echochambers on social media all the time, but are perfectably comfortable falling into ones of our own, without trying to understand how the world outside is really like.
I agree with your take on ethics courses being mandatory for CS or engineering college students though. It was mandatory at my college, and I found it to be pretty useful.
EDIT: as pointed out, i incorrectly used "contract" instead of "contact" in the first sentence. Fixed, as it doesn't meaningfully change my point at all. The part relevant to the point I was making was in the "... because Meta is causing irreparable damage to society" half of the sentence.
Solution: layoffs
PS it's not just us. We've seen industry-wide data showing that it's a broader issue.
On the mobile app literally over half my feed is ads.
At this point skipping a story or feed ad in Instagram is like a nearly instant reflex for me.
Plus, the programming on the recommendations is laughably amateur for company as resourceful as Meta. If I interact with an ad one time I’ll see the same ad over and over for days or weeks.
Sure, I was curious for a second, but it seems strange that Meta can’t tell that I’m not interested anymore just by monitoring basic usage of the UI.
At the end of the day the advertiser is the one left paying for these repeated ineffective ad impressions.
Somewhat related, I am a little surprised Meta hasn’t tried a Discord-like revenue model where paid annual memberships bestow quality of life and cosmetic social status types of benefits. Even if it wasn’t their main source of revenue it could at least diversify the business and lend some stability to their revenue.
Facebook’s revenue per user is less than $10. Discord charges $99/year for Nitro. I feel like Meta has such a one-track mindset on advertising that it doesn’t consider different revenue models for its businesses.
Meta spends a lot of time talking about the metaverse but Discord is already the metaverse. Why isn’t there a subscription Meta Quest game pass with Discord-like social features? It’s a no-brainer.
Where’s the “pro” paid version of Instagram? Why doesn’t Instagram sell subscription access to things like exclusive camera filters, stickers, and editing tools?
I feel like the company is full of missed business opportunities.
It's called retargeting.
I think GP is talking about a more specific thing, and it's one I experience all the time too: that I'll visit a website briefly one time, by accident, or to satisfy some curiosity, or look up the specifications on something I already own, or to get a link to send to a friend, or whatever other non-purchase reason, and then get shown ads for their thing over and over and over again until the end of time despite the fact that there's a 0% chance that I will ever buy it.
I'm sure it's true that, in the general case, advertisers want to show ads to customers multiple times, but in these particular cases, they shouldn't want to show them to me -- I'm definitely not going to buy the thing, and they're wasting their money, and it seems like Facebook ought to be able to better differentiate between users like me who will definitely not convert and users who might (like GP said: seems like there ought to be detectable patterns in the way I do or don't engage with the content that should signal my lack of interest).
Step two, I get retargeted. That’s fine and expected.
Step three, I get retargeted. Again. And again…and again.
What I don’t understand is how Meta/Instagram can’t figure out at least a little bit sooner that I was clearly just satisfying my curiosity and now every time I see the same ad I scroll by extra fast or otherwise interact in ways that should indicate disinterest.
It is annoying, but it's not illogical.
If you have looked at something once, say there's a 99% chance that you have no further interest in it. But the 1% chance that you are potentially going to buy it after being shown the ad again is still much better odds than showing it to a random person, or a random person who is somehow correlated to the target market.
Even after seeing the ad 50 more times and ignoring it, you are probably still a statistically better lead than someone who has never interacted with the ad. They're not making a strong assumption about you, even though it seems that way. They're making a very weak assumption based on the small number of people who clicked once, hesitated, saw the ad 49 times more, carried on hesitating, and now are finally ready to buy.
I do wonder if advertisers can turn that behavior off and/or limit the number of times their product is shown to the same person.
I also wonder if Meta has some kind of model that's predicting post-impression interest.
If advertisers had a better option, Meta will have gone out of business by next week.
Their fundamental advantage was network effect, I guess that is dead now that like 1/5 posts I see is from a friend.
It's a negative feedback loop.
It seems crazy to try and compete with Tiktok on their home turf, they sound to have a pretty competent implementation and Facebook has got to be about as nimble as a barge at this point.
I routinely get ads for Boston, NY, Japan, Taiwan, Germany.
I've been to NY and Japan but none of the other places. So I don't think it's using my previous locations.
You've been to NY, so you're interested in NY, so FB will make money fleecing restaurants in NY wasting their ad money on you.
post AD post AD post AD
I'm used to ads, I grew up watching cartoons and shows on prime time old airwaves TV and listening to music on Top 50 radio shows. This is worse. No other media is as bad as Facebook ad-wise and no other media is worse than what prime TV and radio where in the 90s. They devolved.
Does this imply that Facebook is showing ads in places they should not be, because they have inventory they cannot sell?
Attribution means being able to "attribute" a user and the conversions (eg signups, purchases, etc) they do back to your ad spend. So typically, advertisers want to be able to know that e.g. this ad campaign spent $100, led to 5 clicks, which led to 2 sign-ups and 1 purchase. Before the iOS privacy changes, Facebook could piece all those things together even though the ad might be running either on Facebook or another app, and the conversions are happening in your ad. Aka they could "attribute" the events back to the ad. With the new changes, Facebook can't put all those pieces together as easily, so they can either only do it on an aggregated basis (ie not user-by-user), and/or use probabilistic "modeling" to do attribution. This is good for users, since they are less likely to be tracked, but bad for advertisers who now cannot easily know how effective their ad spend is.
> ... efficiency fluctuating
Let's say one day you spend $1000 and get 100 purchases, that's $10 / purchase. A purchase nets $15 for you, so that is good ad spend. The next day, you spend $1000 and only get 50 purchases, so it's $20 / purchase and you are losing money on your ad spend. These numbers fluctuate a lot more wildly than they did in the past, and it seems to happen randomly, making it hard to commit to spending a certain budget.
This is probably related to attribution, because Facebook uses a lot of Machine Learning to predict who to show an ad to, where to show it, etc based on past conversions. But if they can't really attribute past conversions, it's hard for their Machine Learning model to consistently get results.
Apple will probably fill in that void at some point they've got a lock on all that intelligence. I'm curious how long it will take and how they will manage to do it without stepping on privacy toes.
Note that I strongly dislike adtech as a business model, but my hat is off to their cunning marketing if Apple pulls it off.
Apple has been around for a while, they I wonder if the company has some institutional 'survival instinct' that's identified growing the ad platform become too much as long-term unhealthy. It is a corrupting influence that makes the consumer into the enemy, after all.
They've also managed to become incredibly huge while somehow mostly dodging the eye of regulatory bodies. Privacy could mess with that track record and I'm sure they are aware of that fact.
A problem I see with FB is that they don't control anything on which they run. They run on stuff from their competitors: it's either Google (Chrome / Android), Microsot (Windows / Edge) or Apple (OS X / Safari / iOS).
Despite the downturn these three behemoths are still enjoying a market cap in the trillion+. Meta is actually down to $360 bn. Meta controls neither the OS nor the browser.
They want to change that by having people switching en masse to the Metaverse but I'm really not sure this is happening.
This is what makes me really uneasy about React. I feel there is too much cargo cult of a technology that doesn’t even work for their creators in the first place.
The tech isn't even close to there yet.
Current gen VR tech demos sparks the imagination, and it's definitely great for people that want to like it... But that's not even close to good enough for mass adoption.
Their teased prototypes look like a solid upgrade, but it's still not going to be enough.
Mobile procedures just don't have enough graphics power yet and the one's we do have consume too much power. We're missing several hardware breakthrough before mass adoption becomes likely from my perspective as a VR headset owner.
It's probably gonna happen eventually, but not necessarily with current tech.
Meta might succeed if it stays on the ball and keeps pushing for centuries, but i don't think it's management will do so.
Centuries? I haven't taken a close look at VR (though I'm flirting with buying a headset soon, just for kicks...) but I'd always assumed it was more like 10-25 years away.
What are the hardware breakthroughs that you think would do it?
Very light AR glasses can be an interesting proposition but they will not provide the VR immersive experience.
I'm not sure what people expect from VR but it's not Ready Player One and will not be for a very long time. However, playing Half Life Alyx is quite phenomenal even today on current hardware.
And it will be fun to watch from the outside.
Unfortunately, I don't expect this endeavor to give interesting fruits to humanity, but sometimes happy accidents happen.
And we never need Oculus for anything. That's a big difference.
Very few people need oculus/VR, while a lot people need cars. Possibly a lot more like 10000x
Finally, even for people who get hopelessly car sick as passengers no matter what they do, the advantage of a fast safe private ride often outweighs the discomfort - especially since no one is spending more than 1h in a car more often than a few times a year. It is very hard to imagine what application could make VR give even close to the amount of utility that cars give you.
Why as a consumer, do I want to wear something on my head? especially since, handheld phones are already way more engaging than I need. Are VR headsets just another entertainment device (something I have way too much of already) or will it facilitate work from home?
I still think they are going to fail spectacularly there, but I suppose I can't blame them for trying.
I know I'm armchairing the devil so to speak but I think this would have been a good long term play for them, but I imagine their expertise at the time was antithetical to hardware.
They bet that they did not need to, but unfortunately for Meta, looks like they should have.
The muscle is around contract negotiation with the carriers and co-opting those partnerships, but they had the money to burn on this.
[1] Or watch Feel Good Videos ABOUT People Spontaneously HELPING Poor ANIMALS Trapped In A PREDICAMENT [2].
[2] That the people in question may or may not have put them into.
Imo at the end of the day people don't give two shits about privacy, convenience is king
They could all definitely manufacture Android devices and hold some Android sub-market share, but that business isn't interesting to them. They wanted to control a platform, and when it was clear that wasn't going to happen (after spending many billions), they gave up.
But Microsoft and Google and Meta were not interested in “in person support” or business that does not scale, and part of the price they pay for that is to be gimped by Apple at a moments notice and watch your market cap dive.
I can't use the device.
If I dig into the box, and drag it out, I need to deal with all of this stuff. I want to play for example Superhot, but I have no idea how to even reinstall or even if I need to reinstall because I need to login with something above "all over again".
Fucking trash.
The "Metaverse" is just a bad joke regardless if it worked perfectly, but all of this crud means that I can't even be bothered picking up the actual device.
You do realize you just described the vast majority of all tech companies that exist today, right?
Edit: Even today, I'm still seeing ads for a subwoofer that I bought back in early August. Good going, Meta.
a) what if they don't? Why should they?
b) I would lose a lot of trust in Apple if they did. I don't buy iOS devices because I trust Apple Ads better. I buy them because I can avoid ads better and my privacy doesn't get shredded in the process.
c) Wouldn't that be a massive antitrust issue?
A lot of advertisers are thus shifting their ad spend into Apple.
Honestly I don't use FB, but my wife does, and I can tell you she spends about 1/100th the time in the Apple App Store as FB.
I don't see Search Ads as having anywhere near the same context.
They will because they are a for-profit company and there's profit to be had. Apple will likely find a strong marketing angle for their Ad network (won't be the first time they've tried).
Selling hardware is a great business but it gets saturated eventually. The next move for eternal growth is selling services on top of said hardware.
> I would lose a lot of trust in Apple if they did. I don't buy iOS devices because I trust Apple Ads better. I buy them because I can avoid ads better and my privacy doesn't get shredded in the process.
Apple already has a lot of data about you. Consider that they own both the hardware and software experience on an iPhone. I'm having a hard time seeing an alternative here unless you have the time to manage your own phone OS...
> Wouldn't that be a massive antitrust issue?
Only if someone does something about it. I assume G and Meta's lawyers are already working on arguments.
While I don’t undermine the spying potential of TikTok, the ban was strangely timed - soon after a huge investment from Facebook in India’s biggest company (and one with tremendous lobbying power). Only a handful of Chinese apps were banned, even though majority of devices running them were Chinese as well (and went unbanned).
Facebook very well would have lost the massive Indian market as well without the TikTok ban.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/24/technology/eu-regulation-...
There are large downstream effects the iOS privacy changes are having on mobile advertising and the viability of companies that rely on mobile programmatic to bring people in the door.
As consumers start understanding exactly how adtech works - and such education took decades - they are freely choosing devices that limit tracking, and when given the option to opt-out, are opting out at extremely high numbers. This tells you something about what consumers want.
Businesses would be more viable if they learned to market through mechanisms that were less distasteful to consumers.
What are they? Android is copying Apple[0]. Desktop?
[0] - https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/16/google-plans-android-privacy...
It's tough for businesses that thrived on the privacy-compromising features of early 21st century adtech. They can adapt or die.
I can assure you that consumers do not. Even someone in this comment section of a technical form didn't know what attribution is which is an important part of how adtech works. Even from an extremely high level the prevalence of the phrase "XYZ is selling your data" despite that not happening is a clear sign that most people just parrot what they hear than actually understand. There has been a large amount of scaremongering about how bad this tracking is to people. This scaremongering drives more people to opt out than people opting out who actually understand how it works.
>Businesses would be more viable if they learned to market through mechanisms that were less distasteful to consumers.
That is not true. If the cost of that alternative marketing costs more than what you will make from doing it then the business is not viable.
Third option was to take out ads in a specialist publication to reach an audience that would mostly be aligned with your product (ie. business that makes chess boards taking out an ad in a chess magazine). This is probably the closest equivalent of targeted advertising today.
The barrier to entry for retail has dropped ridiculously with Shopify, allowing for niche and specialised retailers in a way that was previously not feasible. Acquiring new customers is still the hardest thing for a business to do, always has been and always will be, without the ability to reach new customers and connect with the audience who is interested in the businesses niche that is all dead in the water.
Now businesses, that do depend on a positive ROI on ad spend, in order to compete and survive: they are F*ked, sadly.
https://frinkiac.com/caption/S04E21/888169
I highly doubt it
> or would sites like Reddit draw in some of those users
probably. I get the impression reddit is doing more marketing to non tech people, and more people I know have said positive stuff about reddit out of nowhere
but also... I feel like this is unrelated, but reddit has seriously gone downhill since what it was in like 2015. It's a good idea but the users make it insufferable
I expect Meta will be closing labs in the USA and opening them in other, cheaper, English speaking companies.
Zuck is blaming the economy, but Meta's real problem is that Apple tightened iOS privacy. Meta had built a business on tracking people, and when iOS tightened privacy, Meta could not target ads as effectively as before.
I used to work in user tracking, and it's very easy to track people down to near-unique from several metrics.
I've noticed that users on HN like to use the phrase "eating their lunch" to describe the dynamic between TikTok and Facebook.
It would be interesting to search HN comments from the past 12 months for "eating their lunch" and analyze what proportion of them refer to TikTok.
It's really not though, nor is it an original one. There are real people with real problems in the world and we've seen over and over that increasingly virtualizing our interactions, with a few exceptions, is a great way of kicking those problems down the road.
It just seems like a mix of xbox kinect and roblox
maybe zuck is just having a midlife crisis, who knows
The thing is, this isn't 2008, not by a long shot. They can keep complaining, but the jobs numbers speak for themselves.
It is modern corporate style to have CEO's shed tears (sometimes literally) to show that their cold calculations actually have love behind them, but this is all just PR. We should recognize Mark's statement for what it is — standard corporate PR. And we should offer such statements as much respect as standard corporate verbiage deserves and not get into the substance of the statements as there typically is none.
They over-hired low[er] quality employees (by his own admission) when the stock exploded in 2020. Now they'll do anything to avoid official layoffs to save face.
loool
> Meta is not the only advertising company to be hit by broader economic challenges.
interesting they are referenced as advertising company..
https://www.statista.com/statistics/267031/facebooks-annual-...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1093781/distribution-of-...
Meta and Google are advertising companies, their "products" are just a way to:
- gather data: whatsapp/messenger, maps, youtube, "like"/"share" buttons, reviews &c.
- display ads: google search, youtube, instagram, fb feed
- display a "buy" button: google search, youtube, instagram
The only "new" products they don't shutdown after a year are products that allows them to gather more data / show more ads / get more "buy" clicks. Everything else get terminated no matter what
1. We're aware of the economic situation and what others companies are doing and are just monitoring
2. We decided to just to ever-so-slightly ease off the gas on hiring. It's definitely not a hiring freeze. Do not use those words.
3. Things are delayed just until the budget is discussed
4. No new hires (still don't call it a freeze) <-- We are here
5. Small amount of layoffs ?
6. Large amount of layoffs ?
(1-4 was about 3 weeks.)
While others find him inconsiderate, I appreciate that Zuckerberg is at least not all corpspeak. Too bat he bet on the losing horse with the Metaverse and now has to stay in until either it succeeds or he gets sacked.
But, stuff like this should make Facebook employees angry. Zuckerberg is not a person to envy.
Read this: https://www.velvetropes.com/backstage/mark-zuckerberg-house
Also, a few years ago Zuckerberg spent like $27 million for his own personal security in a 365 day period, which is obviously obscene.
Clearly he is a paranoid dude and certainly he keeps to himself.
But, he is a hardcore oligarch, that’s for sure.
- https://www.dirt.com/gallery/moguls/tech/snapchat-evan-spieg...
- https://www.dirt.com/gallery/moguls/finance/brian-armstrong-...
It's a wonder he hasn't been pushed out yet. I'm pretty sure he's holding enough stock to prevent it from happening, but you have to wonder what kind of internal pressure there is in the Facebook C suite right now
Edit: IC7+ is explicitly not frozen.
> The only roles that will remain open are SWE IC7+, Data Center roles, and 2023 Intern, Pathway and AI STE class hiring
Meta should have plainly seen the writing on the wall with regard to their data collection and privacy practices but either wouldn't, or more likely couldn't, pivot to new areas.
And now Zuck is here saying this hiring freeze is due to the economic situation. Peak comedy. The reality is Meta has no answer for TikTok, BeReal, Apple/Google privacy changes, or whatever else is coming to the market next.
I wish Meta nothing but the worst, but I'm sorry for any unfortunate souls who chose to work their and will be out of a job.
Innovation at this point != success
Just look at Oracle... they're still alive and doing OK
They don't need to at this point. They have FB, IG, WhatsApp, and Messenger
That's already a lot to begin with, they could've just coasted and they'd be fine
But instead they have their idiot CEO creating PR nightmare after PR nightmare (just look at this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8q2BQOGRGE and tell me he isn't a liability) and funneling billions into what's going to be the biggest business mistake of this decade
I’d additionally argue that Meta is functionally coasting by way of flailing about on useless products. FB is flatlining, and IG is getting eaten alive by TikTok and BeReal. Oculus is seemingly healthy, and WhatsApp has a dominant and entrenched position. However, what is WhatsApp and Oculus worth if FB and IG fail?