"Meta is planning another round of layoffs, I can unfortunately confirm. Leadership has been coy both internally and externally about what is coming, but I’m told that the current plan is to announce more cuts in March after last year’s performance bonuses are paid out. Given what I’ve heard about plans to cut certain orgs by double-digit percentages, I wouldn’t be surprised if the total number is somewhere in the ballpark of the last layoff, which was about 11,000 people or 13 percent of the company."
Bots are even more insidious than before, I deleted my account and now only use it to follow breaking news about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and I constantly get errors, videos not loading, glitches on the page.
Not sure what you mean "running fine", I'm dreading opening Twitter links because it got so frustrating... It's attrition, it's slowly degrading.
Not sure if that's actually caused by the recent changes as opposed to confirmation bias or merely the renewed attention that Twitter recently got.
I wouldn't comment on their moderation being better or worse since the acquisition considering they were already at zero as they couldn't even regex-out very obvious crypto scam tweets in reply to high-profile accounts.
> I'm dreading opening Twitter links because it got so frustrating
Me too, though that has nothing to do with the acquisition and was just as bad as before - something to do with justifying having dozens/hundreds of frontend engineers so they shipped a monster weighing megabytes to display ~300 characters of text.
imo working fine is a stretch and I don't mean outages. This month I've encountered a lot of strange bugs in the app. Sometimes it'll just not load new content, sometimes it's notifying that somebody posted something, but on press, nothing new is shown, strange things related to retweets. I don't really remember so many bugs before musk
Did you think the servers would shut themselves off? Of course it's still running. But if you think twitter is running fine you're self selecting news and are ignoring reality.
I imagine Meta has a harder time recruiting then their peer companies, because of their reputation and the moral hazard. I wonder how much investment it will take them to get staff levels back to where they are now. It really feels like they are peaking as a company.
Maybe this will be true in the years going forward, but AFAIK even in 2022 they were still considered top tier FAANG to work for among new grads, if only for the fact that compensation is generally somewhat higher than their peers.
It's only higher than other big tech companies because they have so much difficulty hiring new grad. it's what's holding the funnel together, the moment comp drops compared to the others they will lose a ton of candidates.
Since ~2016 Meta employment has signaled to me that someone values high compensation above anything else. This view has become so popular that choosing to work at Meta indicates you are fine broadcasting this signal.
There might be some exceptions for those working on Oculus, but it's not a blanket exception.
I'm not sure that's entirely fair. Whatever you think of the company that's no denying they have interesting problems to work on, such as AI, plus ordinary big tech scaling. Plus you don't know whether a person even had other offers.
This is the case across most Big Tech. If not for compensation, why would you choose to work in a large organization? Tech productivity peaks somewhere around 500-2k engineers in an org, by the time you hit 10-50k different groups look like different companies in terms of coordination tax.
It is not so easy to get a (first) job in FAANG. They sieve out a lot of bad programmers during their recruitment process.
Probably some recruiters beleive that if you managed to get to a FAANG and stay for 2-3 years, then you are competent enough for many other jobs.
So in theory working there opens doors.
It used to be similar in finance, where getting that internship at Mckinsey/Bain/BCG or in BIG4 (deloitte, ey, kpmg, pwc) meant something - in some countries it was like 1000 candidates per 1 place. But I feel it is much fewer nowadays.
aye - it definitely signals rigor. However it is worth questioning whether Google at 30k employees has the same signaling effect as Google at 186k employees. Either the number of highly qualified engineers has increased by 4x - or the bar has lowered over time.
I'd imagine that 4 years from now having OpenAI on your resume will be a much better signal than Google, if only for the reason that there are only 400 people who can claim OpenAI as their background.
> whether Google at 30k employees has the same signaling effect as Google at 186k employees
This is why prestigious universities don't invest in increasing class sizes. The student demand is there. There is no lack of world class professors to hire, and larger facilities could be built. An Ivy league is capable of reaching 10x enrollment in 20 years while raising tuition and providing the same quality of education. However, within 50 years the brand will carry less prestige.
For me, it’s because I liked systems stuff at university. Scaling to and beyond the level of FAANG is pretty interesting and I’m not sure where else I would have been able to work at that level. It’s also quite nice to be able to really dive deep into a specific area, although more diversity wouldn’t have been bad (for building longer term skills)
Engineer productivity mattered a lot less, because straight out of university it’s not like I knew enough to be productive from the start anyway.
Compensation-wise, finance tech pays a lot better, although is most cases it is a WLB tradeoff.
New grads have lost their minds. It is really sad to see the state of affairs. When we were coming out we used to shun large companies. Now they are joining large companies. Sad!
The money is just too good to put aside. Plus, the cost of housing has gotten through the roof, so you'd have to be a real and committed idealist (or to have family money) in order to shun that type of compensation coming your way.
If it matters I'm in my early 40s and I have left money on the table in the past because of said idealism, but if I were to be a 20-something again and especially in today's market I'm not sure I would do the same thing.
Building a widespread surveillance society and a centralized trove of user profile data, in a jurisdiction known for disregarding human rights to privacy (see FAA702 et c) and committing genocide when it suits their ends.
Building such a machine (Instagram, FB, WhatsApp, etc) poses a grave danger to a free society if misused, but Meta will not be the ones directly harmed when the databases they built are misused in bulk by the state to commit mass human rights violations or other atrocities.
I would add the greatly adverse effect on mental health, especially for young people. Here probably Instagram is the worst offender but they just ignore it even though there is concrete data proving the point.
if you compare Meta to wall street firms and a bunch of other rent-seeking firms, Mata is actually causing much less harm. Somehow those other worse companies get a free pass.
They are better than Apple and Google. Worse than new twitter. If I was to try and work for something - would be twitter. Seems like after all the self righteous people are out - it can have this old school atmosphere.
One round of layoffs at every company is just coming off the hiring bender of the last few years.
But a second... that portends a third... and a general collapse of tech a la the dotcom crash.
I had't been too worried yet, despite feeling lucky to have dodged the customary 7% at my company, but this news is starting to make me worry. Hopefully it's just Meta being in a uniquely bad position.
The layoffs are nowhere near the level of even appearing in a histogram against the hiring that overwhelmed 2021/22. Where this doomering comes from must be the plain human temptation to glorify misery.
Both this hiring-like-there-is-no-tomorrow and, a few short months later, layoffs "because the economy has changed" indicate lack of any sanity in business planning. Sure, most of these people will probably eventually find other jobs, but the randomness of these ups and downs in presumably mature companies is pretty disturbing.
My more pessimistic take is that this style of business planning is actually planned, in that companies knew what they were doing was risky but knew they could just layoff people, as they have readily done. It is a plain as day showcase of companies treating employees as their greatest costs and liabilities rather than assets.
But in what demented mind do you temporarily hire tens of thousands of extremely expensive and highly skilled workers (to do what?) and then wipe out all those projects in a year?
Even if you treat people as completely disposable garbage, it doesn't even make any sense in terms of projects, to urgently come up with projects for 10k+ people then urgently cancel them. Again, these are decades-old, established, money-making companies.
I actually agree with your analysis, too. It must honestly be both a case of treating employees as liabilities and idiotic planning.
I have never understood layoffs, especially where the companies start re-hiring immediately after. I was at a startup that did insane hiring and then performed layoffs. They pitched it as employees not performing, but what had really happened is that the upper management overhired because of growth hype and then never correctly trained and onboarded employees. I didn't get laid off, but I literally got moved from one team to a new team only for the new team to be disbanded and merged back into my original team, all within like four months. Even with all that going on, I got switched between projects like every month. Like, how is your planning that bad that that happens?
A first portends a second which portends a third which portends the collapse of tech which portends the collapse of the global economy which portends nuclear war which portends the extinction of the human race.
or we find out that current gen of tech companies are no longer the innovators and wall st also has stopped buying the story of them being growth companies and wants their money back. Definitely good for the next gen if innovators!
Or we'll find out how company founders might be great at founding and running a 100 person shop but truly lack vision and managerial skill to run a 100,000 people corporation.
Google just kept (is keeping) its laid off employees on the payroll during the WARN period, but cut all other ties. WARN notices went out when layoffs were announced.
Pretty sure the severance package is on top of the WARN period employment. The announcement said:
> We’ll pay employees during the full notification period (minimum 60 days).
> We’ll also offer a severance package starting at 16 weeks salary plus two weeks for every additional year at Google, and accelerate at least 16 weeks of GSU vesting.
It feels like Windows Mobile. Meta has the early start, money, captive audience and enthusiasm, but they don't have the hardware/software edge (that Apple coincidentally also has this time around) to really make the idea work. The headsets are not going to revolutionize much running Facebook games on budget Qualcomm SoCs, and Facebook cant buy an Unreal Engine or an M2 Pro overnight.
This makes a ton of sense because a lot of Unity's business is in their ad platform, not engine licensing. Horizon Worlds is written in Unity, and it gives them full control over their hardware/software platform.
It would do a lot of harm to Unity's relationship with smaller developers though, to Godot's benefit.
"An innovation brand comes from building tangible new products. Our work in VR/AR is the best example we have. Our core social networking work is no longer new, Internet.org is extending something rather than inventing it, and AI is not yet tangible... succeeding in VR/AR has the most innovation potential in the next 5-10 years."
Not spend $10B/year on AI, not change the name of company from Facebook to 'AIBook', not launch equivalent of ChatGPT instead buy Occulus and then launch MetaQuest.. and similar such bets?
Meta AI employees will privately tell you Google, Open AI and a bunch of others are much more advanced than them. For some reason Google can't capitalize on it and it can't be because "AI is not in their DNA"...
Interesting comment. Curious who you see to be the winning horses, or at least candidates. OpenAI is certainly something special. Not sure who else I'd add to the list. AirBnB has a really strong culture of experimentation and infra for it. Their product is boring though. From your perspective, is it about culture, product, people, something else?
A16 should be compared with Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, Samsung and Qualcomm always play this release half year later with “better performance at cost of energy consumption” game.
I don't understand at all where you're coming from. Phones with a SM8450 (Snapdragon 8 gen 1) were available in January, 2022.
Phones with A16 were available in September 2022.
Phones with a SM8550 (Snapdragon 8 gen 2) were available in January, 2023.
You're saying it is unreasonable to compare the last two (4 months apart), and instead the valid comparison is between the first two (8 months apart). That doesn't seem fair.
You pretty much described the game's timeline, in order for a phone available in September, you have to compete all resources as everybody is competing for the holiday shopping season, the EVT/DVT probably are done latest in May otherwise you will see a major news piece says Apple is having difficulties doing ABC. However, if you push the release date to a few months later into early next year, all the resources along is available idle for you and naturally more buffer everywhere.
Samsung/Qualcomm used to do the "June release / Sep available" model about 10 - 12 years ago, they always lose to Apple from every aspect. So instead of directly compete with the "in cycle" release for the holiday season, they made the release looks earlier in the year, but then compete with a product released last year for the holiday season.
Holiday sales are big, they're not bigger than the rest of the year. Samsung were targeting Mobile World Congress in February for the main Galaxy line phones basically from the start (from Galaxy S2).
I was a bit dubious about the benchmarks posted earlier in the thread, for the last decade we're used to Apple having such a long lead that timing didn't matter. But given how hard you're pushing this "it's unfair to compare the currently available phones" angle, I guess the benchmarks are legit and they really have lost the lead.
I don't think you are wrong. I do think vr is Sony's to lose, though. The number of PlayStations they have in consumers houses is insane. And the new vr2 is quite impressive.
It’s also $150 more than the Quest 2 which has also been out for 2.5 years, I don’t really think it’s going to put any sort of dent into the Quest 2s numbers.
There’s about 7 million PS5s sold in the last quarter and about 1 million Quest 2s sold in Q2 last year. I somehow doubt that every one of, or even 1/7th of those PS5 owners will spend the cost of a console on PSVR so I would argue that it’s still very much Meta’s game to lose.
Edit: clarified the sales numbers are for a single quarter. The point is that even if there’s a lot of potential buyers for the PSVR I don’t think there will be nearly enough conversions.
How so? They really are not. The VR market is not really big enough to have devices specialized for one part of VR vs another.
You put either of them on to play games. That’s it. Where’s the market differentiator?
To a common person, they’re not going to see the differences that exist. They will say “oh Timmy wants to play VR” and get whatever option they can to allow Timmy to play VR. Both the Quest and PSVR2 are options for that.
And the Quest has been out longer, has an existing user base 1/7th of a PS5 and doesn’t cost the same price as a new console. All of those very much work in it’s favor.
Probably more accurate to say they are different demographics. Is laughably odd if you consider facebook to be social. Either bragging about doing things with others or to others. Current VR is very much not social. Largely single player games where you are literally disconnected from the people in the same room as you.
Folks I know that have PlayStations completely overlaps people willing to play with VR. Folks I know on Facebook... Not so much.
They made a solid move into vr. But vr will be gaming well before it is anything else. To try and break into that market as anything else is just not a likely entry.
What even is this argument? You don’t need a Facebook account for the Quest 2, and what do you think people do with their Quest devices? Put them on and stare deeply into the void? No, they buy it to play games.
I'm not making a nuanced argument here. Sony has a clear pipeline for creating games. And a somewhat established market for marketing said games. Along with a ton of experience for doing the same. Facebook... has none of those things. Just a fair bit of money.
Can you break into a market with money? Sure. Microsoft did it. They are still a distant 3rd in that market.
If only consoles could be used for more "workstation" things, including VR. I would have killed for a windows/linux desktop with a PS5 or XSX chip and 24GB-32GB of unified RAM.
They don't have the enthusiasm I don't think, and I believe that is where it falls flat. The technology is not currently something that everyone wants and definitely not something everyone needs.
VR is not good at general computing yet, and the form factor and way you engage with it means people won't be using it in the same way they use TVs, game consoles or smart phones. Mass adoption takes apealing to the lowest common denominator and VR doesn't do that, which is eventually going to be an issue of fashion as much as utility.
No one wants to sit on a bus in a Quest headset, no one wants to sit alone when their friends are in the same room, no one wants to look like a dork at work. Mass adoption is no where near happening to the current state of the art, we have more technology leaps and form factor pivots before we arrive at something a mass adopted social network would work, let alone something aiming to replace segments of business and commerce use cases.
I think the tipping point is closer than you may realise. There has been material progress in form factors in the last year or so and we are not nearly done with the improvements that are on the radar.
Once we hit a certain point with the form factor, quite a wide range of use cases will become a no-brainer (for example, sitting on the bus with it).
People use their 1200 dollar / euro phones on the bus and in the street at night all the time. Not sure what you're suggesting specifically about public transport - but I would never wear a visually occluding headset on a bus in Ireland. But I would wear it on a coach here, or on a bus in Germany, which has a much safer public culture. Providing it had a small form factor, was relatively discrete etc.
a phone is small, can be easily put away, and can be used while doing other things with limited or no loss of basic spatial awareness; it's not hard to look up from a phone, or put it away.
and it's not just the crime angle, it's things like not missing your stop or being aware of the people moving around you so that you're not a nuisance.
I agree with you based on current hardware, but past the tipping point literally
everything you say works in favor of using VR with pass through (let's call it
MR). These are all in fact the sorts of reasons why I see it as
inevitable that this tech will become ubuiquitous, it's only a question of timing.
I would. You think someone's gonna snatch it off my head or something? I wear 300 dollar noise cancelling headphones at stare at my 1000 dollar phone on the bus every day
VR isn't good at general computing because noone has really embraced the form factor and given it the attention it needs. The issue is, meta is not doing that. Hopefully the upcoming apple ar/XR/vr stuff will be a bit better.
The oculus go failed terribly, because no-one made content for it. Microsoft's attempt at arm laptops failed, because no-one made applications for it. Apple was able to convince people it was worth considering arm, maybe they can get people to consider vr?
> Apple was able to convince people it was worth considering arm
I'm not sure I'd phrase it this way. What Apple did was just great engineering and planning, along with a user focus. Also the fact that it was either embrace ARM or leave. :)
What I mean by that is, they launched their ARM/Apple Silicon line of computers and cut off their ties with Intel. They managed to get people buying the new ARM computers by providing an excellent user experience and incredibly good backwards compatibility with the older Intel binaries via Rosetta2. They also started rolling back some of their unpopular decisions of prior years - namely dropping all but USB-C ports and MagSafe. They also started providing Pro laptops without the dreaded TouchBar (yes, some people like it but I don't think numbers are much in its favour).
Then they engaged with the developer community and their users to help everybody transition.
you realize every single thing you said would have been true when talking about the first smartphones?
The iPhone in 2007 was not a good general computing device, and people were made fun of for looking like dorks because they stared constantly at their screens. And yet here we are, in a future where smartphones diligently satisfy all of consumer's needs and zoning out by looking at your black slab is normalized.
We stared at our screens long before 2007, but started doing it more when big screen smartphones became popular. VR adoption is negligible - less than 10 million devices were sold last year, there's no precedent or proof the masses want it.
I don’t think the comparison makes the point you’re trying for: iPhones became part of people’s lives quickly – I remember executives suddenly pushing for mobile websites – and people who had them used them heavily & inspired other people to buy them.
VR costs more and has been on the opposite trajectory: the only thing you ever hear people be excited by are a handful of games (and maybe VRChat for a few communities) and the way it requires dedicated space & excludes other people means that even the enthusiasts I know don’t really use it much. I think decades of sci-fi created some demand but I think it’s still in the Palm Pilot era, especially for the number of devices purchased by people who thought they’d use them more.
There's a pretty big difference. The iPhone came out and was a success the first year and just grew from there.
The Oculus has been out since ~2016 or so. I don't think it's a rocketship ready to take off with the right hardware or software. I'm sure there's profit to be made, better days to come, etc., but it's not going to be a smartphone.
The Oculus Quest 2 released at the same time as Xbox Series S/X and PS5. It's sold 15 million units, while the Xbox has sold 20 million and the PS5 has sold 30 million.
While it's less than those two, it's still a very respectable number and incredibly high considering it doesn't have any of the major studios releasing their AAA games on it.
It seems to be based mostly on an analyst company's announcement back in June of 2022, and doesn't look like Meta has released actual numbers.
But there's corroborating data that suggests those numbers could be fairly accurate, such as Qualcomm saying way back in November 2021 that they shipped 10 million units of the chips that power the Quest 2[2]. And also seems to be the only number that's being reported anywhere.
People just don't want to wear a headset. I mean, some do. It's neat. But hard to motivate your employees to build something great when you say it's "the way people will work in the future" when obviously nobody wants this except the bosses.
I think they're also targeting the very wrong audience. Metaverse feels like a weird incarnation of Microsoft Teams - from corporate, to corporate. It's really not for young people. One has difficulty finding examples from history where something new was first adopted by older people and then by younger folk. Even Facebook started as a social network for university students and then spread across the population generation by generation. Meta has apparently forgotten the prime rule of trendsetting; it must always be done by cool people.
Is the Metaverse something that wants to be done and Meta is its birth helper OR is Meta inventing the Metaverse because it needs something immensely big for its business strategy?
My feeling is that Meta is rather running away from a failing business and less running towards a new green meadow.
i really feel like metaverse is only a dream to people with extreme social anxiety. Which may represent a large share of software developers, but only a minority of the general population.
I think it may be popular among kids too - look at Roblox, Fortnite etc.
But for adults.. well after staring at a screen all day the last thing I want to do is stare at another screen, I'd rather lift weights or play guitar or whatever.
As with everything else, it doesn't apply to every adult all the time.
That said, most adults need to work in order to survive. Couple that with the fact that most jobs these days are done either directly in front of a computer or using some screen-enabled device, and it's not hard to see that most adults will have been staring at a screen all day most days.
I don't believe this describes only software developers.
Disclaimer: we are the devs behind VRWorkout
In the fitness space there is a huge group of people who would like to go to the gym but don't because of social anxiety. And VR fitness is already one of the major pillars for the headset manufacturers ( Meta, Pico and HTC ). So the social anxiety issue may very well be a driving factor overall
Where VR fitness does shine is the social aspect without the social anxiety.
Doing an intense full body workout with people across the globe and seeing other express their movements without having to show themselves leads to a much more relaxed an fun experience than for example a Zoom workout.
I am fully aware that this is not for everyone, that's why it's good to have options. I for one wouldn't even have the space or money to put up a peloton bike but I can temporarily allocate 2 square meters between our living room and kitchen for my calisthenics exercises in VR. And by using mixed reality I can even shrink that a bit further.
If you watch kids interact with technology today, you’ll see that there’s already several thriving metaverses in the form of Fortnite, Roblox, and Minecraft. These services no longer function as games in the traditional sense where there’s an objective you complete to win or lose. I mean yes there’s some of that in there still, but you’ll also see they mainly function as digital hangout places where avatars just goof and dance or attend a virtual Travis Scott concert.
To me these are proofs of concept that meta verse is a real thing. The open questions are if these experiences will eventually transition to VR, or if traditional form factors are immersive enough; and if Facebook can make a more compelling experience than the existing services.
The BBC was interviewing some Meta employee in India that was claiming VR is going to be absolutely necessary and Indian families should plan to buy VR sets because they will be needed for the education of their children.
It felt so detached, and the interviewer was very mellow, only saying that perhaps the cost is a problem, but the Meta guy insisted that it's needed so they have to find the money.
Facebook is incapable of building their own Roblox: even their ultra-sanitised always-smiling Horizon Worlds gets piled on by the media with dramatic accusations of VR bullying and VR harassment.
Imagine the kind of pearl clutching you would find in The Guardian if Zuck built something closer to VR Chat or Roblox.
They're trying with Horizon Worlds. The creator tools in it are kinda neat, if limited, but otherwise it feels too sterile to be all that interesting, especially to kids.
Could you imagine your Facebook using parents and grandparents donning a VR headset and regularly interacting with the metaverse? I couldn't, not unless the technology improved dramatically to the point where the headset more closely resembled glasses than yuppie techno goggles. I can't see that happening anytime soon, which is a problem if they're trying to build something with mainstream appeal.
I'm 41 and grew up with access to technology every day of my life. I won't use VR for more than a few rounds of beatsaber. The only way I would use VR for more than shits and giggles is if it was integrated into my standard glasses with very little additional extra bulk/weight. I don't see that happening any time soon. I see AR having a much more useful and tangible impact on our lives. VR is a toy.
To reach the scifi potential of VR, you need to be able to put on your VR headset, recline in a comfy chair, and then run and jump around a virtual world without moving your body.
As long as you need a controller or to physically walk around your living room, it's a neat trick, but a limited one.
Microsoft's failure in mobile was more of a business decision failure than a technology failure, to my understanding. Despite having products ready to launch, both Gates and Ballmer doubled down on the traditional Windows model. For example:
There are some other good articles I remember reading about Pioneer Studios that I am unable to find right now. I think Microsoft could have absolutely dominated the mobile space, but they really sat on their laurels for far too long. I think they had the talent and ability to handle the technology development. They just didn't want to because of Gates and Ballmer.
While I agree Meta probably won't make it on the metaverse side, I disagree with your reasoning.
Famously, Facebook "missed mobile" (were focused on the web) and had to scramble to recover, which they did very well. I see the metaverse efforts as a way to avoid that happening to them again. Which is smart. The point is not to make any money on the hardware; the point is to understand the metaverse so well that when it eventually emerges they will know it better than anyone else and can dominate rather than be squeezed out.
In other words, under this model, Apple's release of some excellent headset would help meta, not threaten it.
All that being said I don't think Meta will succeed. The biggest problem is bootstrap: headsets are clunky and nobody wants to wear them for long, if at all. Because it's early days everybody needs to provide transitional interfaces, but by doing so you are working against learning / predicting what will really happen (remember all those virtual worlds in the early days of the web where you would supposedly move around in a virtual mall? Nobody wants that; they want to jump straight from gap.com to Merrils.com (or in HN case from VScode to Stack Overflow and back), or visit them side-by-side. But the company's efforts are still "me too" like demos from others years ago. They haven't managed to move the state of the art; and if they had would people have booed it too? Probably.
Also, decent, non-enthusiast hardware is so far away that it will be difficult for Meta to maintain focus. It should have been a skunkworks project, or at least a side effort, not something as prominent as it has been.
> The point is not to make any money on the hardware; the point is to understand the metaverse so well that when it eventually emerges they will know it better than anyone else and can dominate rather than be squeezed out.
Except they dont understand it...
We already have pseudo-metaverses in Minecraft, Fortnite, and such, and Meta (so far) is entirely missing the point in their own VR game. Its like they are an AI that has literally forgotten what it is like to be a regular human.
>Meta has the early start, money, captive audience and enthusiasm, but they don't have the hardware/software edge (that Apple coincidentally also has this time around) to really make the idea work
I don't think they have any concrete "idea" either, except "let's make some metaverse".
The progress of AI/ML/ChatGPT will squash any notion of VR for Enterprise. If I was running a 500 person call center for a health insurance company, I'd be looking more into research around AI/ML/ChatGPT to reduce costs vs. VR/AR. Getting a private hosted ChatGPT instance/network, train it on medical claims/insurance use cases and facts, feed it statistics about cases and see if it can handle use cases for processing simpler claims. Give it the same oversight you would a call center employee where people are inspecting the results. That has a ROI of possibly increasing claim processing/reducing claim processors by letting humans handle more complex cases that require actual intelligence. The same process could be applied to any industry that has a lot of text data and doesn't change very quickly.
VR in the Enterprise just isn't good business sense. The ROI isn't going to be there for an enterprise use case with typical office workers/professionals. As ruthless as it sounds, eliminating the need for people with AI handling easier/simpler tasks is a much better investment that scales than purchasing, supporting and training people on VR hardware for some "productivity" benefit that really can't be defined right now.
> train it on medical claims/insurance use cases and facts, feed it statistics about cases and see if it can handle use cases for processing simpler claims
Isn’t this how insurance companies have operated since the mainframe computer age? Why would an adjuster need to talk to this with chatgpt?
This whole management heavy culture needs to F off.
9/10 people who wants to be a manager are awful as software engineers and they know this is the only way they can stay in the game. Out of those who do become engineering managers it seems all they do is talk a bunch of nonsense and add tremendous levels of roadblocks because they suck at understanding the actual technical problems and I’ll be honest. They’re usually awful at understanding business needs too.
Get rid of eng managers.
Put in a team lead and a few people. If your teams are 20 people or something dumb just fire everyone and start over.
You don’t need battalions when the leaders aren’t even soldiers.
Just have fire teams where everyone is a soldier that reports to their team lead. These teams report to a director who is the battalion commander.
Managers should be rare. And they should be actually good at their job.
People don’t quit jobs they quit shitty terrible managers.
Nobody hurt me because for me at least, I’ve gotten every job I’ve applied to. For example I got bored of my last company and my manager, applied to four companies and got each job, then just picked the one that paid most.
I don’t like dealing with incompetent people. It’s that simple. I’m not a bottom feeder lmao.
Congrats, everyone wants you and throw boat loads of money to get you. You're also the only competent person in a sea of incompetence. What would the world do without you?
> If your teams are 20 people or something dumb just fire everyone and start over
This is one of the most irrational things I’ve ever read on here so congratulations I guess. The people in the team are not the ones to blame if the teams are too big, you are (if you are in charge). Therefore if you actually want to fix the problem, the person you need to fire before starting over is yourself.
How do you fix a broken pipe that’s already had a dozen patches on it? Keep adding more and it stays broken?
At some point you have to just rip it out and put a new one in.
I’m personally fine just leaving and getting a new job if things get wack. Unless I can get to senior leadership level I can’t do much when the culture is already so ingrained. That’s why you need an Elon or someone like that with guts to just come in and fire people.
There is certainly scope for a more intelligent and nuanced discussion to be had here than what reads like a junior engineer's half baked rant on the uselessness of engineering managers.
Yes there are awful engineering managers just as there are great ones who are force multipliers for their teams. I've known great engineering managers who were great engineers who naturally became an interface for their teams and some who weren't very technical but were great people managers that got great outcomes for individuals and teams.
Org design, culture, complexity, needs determine the necessity of an engineering management function. Do orgs and engineering management functions become dysfunctional? Yes. Can this be resolved by just eliminating the management layer? Hardly.
Sure, and I'm a staff+ level engineer who has worked at darling unicorns and big media/tech and made a ton of money. I earned that equity payoff. Now I'm working on my own projects and paying for myself to live in SF, so you're free to have whatever opinion.
I know what I'm saying, and out of a dozen plus managers I've worked with over just the last 6 years (re-orgs because they have way too much time on their hands) only 2 have been excellent, and 1 somewhat all right. It isn't my fault that even with terrible engineering managers, I managed to never get below the max rating on any performance review. I know what I know, and I'm good at it.
The bigger companies get, the worse quality of talent that comes in. Most late stage+ employees are there to rest, vest, and cruise. Don't be naive.
The worst part of this is the more and more levels of management that get put in. People start coming in who have spotty technical understandings, but talk a whole lot that sways people who only need a high level understanding of what is going on. Imo this is due to people who cannot operate efficiently nor in a lean manner. Everything needs to be overly complex for them, to prove they’re something.
Again, I'm giving my experience as a competent engineer and I at one point managed 4 people for a few months before I stopped because I was leaving meetings that were a waste of fucking time with other managers. Literally people stroking each other's ego in a passive aggressive way instead of talking business and ensuring their teams succeed. Not to mention the ways they talked about their reports and literal games on how promotions work.
I am super passionate about removing the unnecessary complexity bloat and drama that bad management leads to.
I don't know why you feel the need to give people your background/ability/level to bolster your argument. I'm sure you can string together a coherent argument without the need for an appeal to authority. I'm not calling you a junior engineer, merely observing that the quality of the argument you are making being worthy of a junior engineer's rant.
>The bigger companies get, the worse quality of talent that comes in. Most late stage+ employees are there to rest, vest, and cruise. Don't be naive.
Straw-manning much? I don't see any part of my original argument making a point to the contrary or even addressing the notion of org size.
But I'll bite -> An alternative way of looking at this dynamic in large tech orgs is, that the org sets up a game where people who play the game well can succeed (interview well, do what looks good on impact resumes and against perf rubrics ) without contributing much to the success of the org.
Blame the game not the player, the rest and vesters are resting and vesting because they are achieving optimal utility within the interview/perf/promo game the org has setup, hence dysfunctional orgs.
It's not that flat organisations/startup aren't dysfunctional or that large orgs always end up being dysfunctional but I agree with you that larger engineering orgs often tend to be dysfunctional in many similar ways.
Because I can? Also I don’t have power right now so I go to HN at such times to kill time.
As for the game, I’m all in. I love the game and it’s fun. I’m super competitive and have no problem going back to lobby after a bad game to find a new lobby. I’m playing ranked/hardcore/we it’s called, not single player or un ranked. I’m not a gamer so idk the terms.
As for the late stagers it’s just my observation. It’s what I have observed and they definitely spend more time doing the same things. Usually because they’re doing anything but the work. They have nothing to lose nor any tangible stake.
At small scale there’s no ego. Software engineers answer support queries and help with sales. The goal is to turn your shares from a penny or less to $100.
At late stage is when all the middle management bloat comes in.
You add more and more levels where the level above just wants high level updates. Then managers have associate, manager, sr manager levels. Then you have director, associate director, etc. each level is a sad reminder of what could have been possible. People are more concerned with becoming managers instead of contributing. It’s why many companies become stagnant imo.
Personally I’m done working at companies bigger than 5k people. I was already feeling the pain at like 2-3k people. I can’t imagine working somewhere with 50k plus people. Sounds like hell.
> I don't know why you feel the need to give people your background/ability/level to bolster your argument. I'm sure you can string together a coherent argument without the need for an appeal to authority. I'm not calling you a junior engineer, merely observing that the quality of the argument you are making being worthy of a junior engineer's rant.
You dispelled them as giving a rant that denotes inexperience. They gave their experience as a counter.
I can’t wait to meet one of these mythical force multiplying engineering managers one day. Over the last decade as a senior engineer my experience has been that a mediocre engineer will begin to compensate for their shortcomings by becoming more involved in project management, usually spending most of the engineering time in jira land. Then their manager, who likely did the same damn thing, says “hey you look like management material!” and the cycle continues.
My managers are very good. They act somewhat in-between a coach and a secretary, and never muddle in technical details that they don’t understand. They try doing small-chunked tasks that don’t fit a developer’s schedule.
Aren't you just replacing the word manager with the word "team lead"? What in your view is the difference between the responsibilities of a manager vs a team lead if the team still reports to the team lead?
In my mind the team lead wouldn’t have reports. The whole team is responsible for carrying out the business objective, and the team lead is the best IC on the team to guide the other ICs to the end.
the director level (it could be multiple people) receive leadership objectives for the quarter or year. Their only job is to take their resources/battalion and divvy the work up into small atomic fire teams. Obviously there are many players from UX product QA devops etc. There is a directive, and everyone needs to be on board to WORK.
The team lead is in charge of ensuring the eng work gets done. There might be product or other folks, they’re specialists on the team like a marksman or medic or automatic weapons specialist. This is a tech company we are taking about, the output is a product backed by technology.
They need to be strong technically and take their team to the finish line. They don’t need to waste their time with 1:1 where they can’t remember the last session or making up stupid stories and wasting time in meetings. Just do the work. The team lead is the best engineer on the team and the rest of the team just does their job.
Maybe incentive structure could be set up where the entire team is rewarded for completion. If people don’t feel it’s fair they can leave, but when things work out the reward would be 100s of thousands of dollars for everyone. If you just need bodies to throw at some low hanging problem outsource that work. Otherwise focus on execution.
Like imagine trying to take a building with many doors and floors from an enemy. You want each team nimble enough to move independently of each other while working together via the team leads talking to each other. They lead their teams towards their objective of taking the building.
Engineering managers would just be dead weight. They’re not in the building and don’t have line of sight. They are far away (rarely have I seen eng managers code or get their hands dirty) and because of this cause confusion and disarray. They get information that gets lost in translation or some hero noob on the team wants to try their own plan and the manager gives them time to try it out. Good luck taking that building.
Just keep the work lean, and keep focused on work.
Like so many managers allow their teams to waste time and effort with “finding the right process” or bullshit meetings. Just focus on taking that building.
You've got middle managers (directors) who link teams with leadership priorities. You've got line managers (tech leads) who are in charge of ensuring that work gets done.
never worked somewhere that directors are considered middle management.
I’ve been at places where there was Associate Manager, Manager, Sr Manager, Group Manager, Director, Senior Director, VP, SVP.
That is insane imo. Anyone below director is useless, and the director should just report to the VP or CTO.
My point is that managers should be rare. And teams should be small.
I’m not taking career or technical advice from an associate/manager because they’re usually the worst ICs and overall lowest performers in like 80% or more of the time. This is how they struggle to stay in the game. You have probably heard many people who are the best IC say they don’t want to manage.
They then get managed by the worst people. And they just leave like that when they can’t take their managers BS anymore.
You ever gotten feedback like “you need to speak more in meetings” from one of these low tier managers? All they do is waste everyone’s time in useless meetings. I’m there to work, not pretend I’m smart by making dumb diagrams and writing/sharing 20 page documents on things that have nothing to do with the job. You see these people come out of the woodwork during late stage. And that’s when most of the beat engineers leave and you have commodity tier folks running the show.
It’s just facts. I’m giving my perspective. And it’s frustrating that I have to keep changing jobs because management is always the weak link. People missing deadlines, people putting effort into things that don’t matter, just talking/wasting time.
> That is insane imo. Anyone below director is useless, and the director should just report to the VP or CTO.
Cool. Advocating for fewer layers of managers is very different than what you proposed in your original post, which included the phrase "Get rid of eng managers."
> I’m not taking career or technical advice from an associate/manager because they’re usually the worst ICs and overall lowest performers in like 80% or more of the time. This is how they struggle to stay in the game. You have probably heard many people who are the best IC say they don’t want to manage.
But you will. They'll just be called a Tech Lead and they'll have manager responsibilities.
I don’t consider eng manager on the same level as an executive. They’re middle management.
And back when the first 1-5 billion dollar valuation was created we moved fast and operated in small teams. Since going public and hiring like 5x as many people our valuation has only gone up like 1-2x. I strongly believe that the end game folks are not very good at their jobs and love wasting time coming up with process and spending money on events.
Again I know why this happens. I’m just saying I wish it wasn’t this way. Appearances and perception.. so dumb.
Oh well time to find my next exit hopefully because I love that thrill of building and solving customer problems.
I am so tired of hearing devs complain about managers and anyone else who doesn't think that everything revolves around the dev.
There are a lot of poor, mediocre or bad devs as well as bad managers. The solution to these problems is not to arbitrarily get rid of most of the practitioners.
There is frequently a lack of humility and self awareness in dev culture I'm afraid to say. It was one of the things that made me leave the profession.
IMO the hostility comes from the fact that a bad manager makes all devs in his team, even the good ones, underperform as a whole. A bad dev is simply.. one bad dev. One bad dev causes less damage than an incompetent manager.
It’s also immediately clear when a dev is bad, but managers will weasel out of their responsibility and blame the devs, despite constantly changing requirements, asking for the impossible, not providing the necessary information and resources, etc. a dev doesn’t sabotage a manager’s work like that.
Most managers also aren’t professionally qualified for their position. An education in accounting doesn’t make somebody a manager, just like computer science doesn’t make a dev a team leader.
Domain knowledge, e.g. somebody who doesn’t understand programming is actively harmful as a programming lead. At that point they should just cut their pay and call themselves what they are: a secretary
Cutting twice is terrible for morale, anyone who survived the first is now worried, wondering when it's going to stop. I doubt much has materially changed since the first round, it was only a handful of months ago. Cut hard once, it won't be perfect, you can starting hiring again like BAU priority places that are breaking. Now this is drawn out 6 months of employees waiting for the sword to fall
It's interesting how Facebook's target audience is nearing retirement age, but Meta is going full steam ahead with futuristic VR headset technology. It seems like a real clash of ideas, but I could see this working out well to connect people especially older people who are retired, similar to the Black Mirror episode San Junipero (a surprisingly optimistic and happy episode).
The problem is Meta's headsets have a very core-gamer focused audience left over from the Oculus days, though they've started to pivot away from this in recent years. It's nowhere near ready for a mainstream audience to use for social connections. The headsets are too bulky, the interface is too complicated, and the apps require too much setup, character creation, and are just too involved. Nothing right now passes the grandma test.
Meta has a huge global teenage user base with Instagram and WhatsApp. TikTok complements them rather than replacing. All three are growing.
I don’t know how they’re going to translate that reach to VR profits either, but focusing on Facebook-using retirees misses the big picture of Meta’s growth.
There’s something about social media that makes people confidently extrapolate their local observations to global scale.
Meta’s apps have 3.7 billion active monthly users. That’s half the population of the world! It’s impossible to guess their behavioral trends based only on what you and I see around us.
Even Facebook is growing despite nearly a decade of HN users declaring it’s only used by retirees and will soon die out.
You're very wrong. It's hard to generalize these things but if anything (roughly speaking) teens are on tiktok as are 20+ yr olds, 30-40 are on instagram and 40+ are nowadays on Facebook.
So one thing I was curious about is those who were laying off (at least the big 4) have xyz billions in the bank. If there is truly fat then it can be trimmed by either flattening the org, cutting down pay, changing work hours etc (nobody works just 40 hrs anymore). So the layoffs seem clearly for paying homage to wall st. What would happen if one of these CEOs grew a pair and held off and directed the fat to muscle? Yes their share price would fall in the short term but surely with the trillions and "toughening + austerity" wouldnt a company actually innovate and build more? It seems like the homage to wall st is needed because when CEOs go on their next play they need wall st for a good reference by the looks of it.
yep when you have billions in the bank, firing good staff is tantamount to an admission either that you have literally no good ideas for how to grow the business or that you have a 100% short term view. In either case it ought to be a humliating admission for the leadership of a tech company to make to its investors.
Cutting staff is not going to reduce their revenue for some time, and in the interim their profits increase and thus defends the stock price at a time the tech sector is getting reassessed (valuations are too high, and need adjusting).
The point is, it has nothing to do with having money in the bank to pay them.
Most big tech companies doubled staffing over the pandemic because they saw a 10% chance that people would continue to spend much more time online after the pandemic and they didn't want to miss the opportunities associated with that. They knew that if things went back to normal they could just lay all the extra people off and return to normal and the costs associated with that were worth the 10% chance to see massive growth. The idea that there was some sort of mistake seems pretty naive to me. Meta doesn't employ fortune tellers, they just react to the probabilities they see.
I find that my FB feed is roughly 50% ads. Sometimes there are two, or even three ads in a row. I barely use it anymore (and I've literally never clicked on an ad). I wonder why FB thinks people will use their product when it is half advertisements. People watch 21 mins of TV with 9 mins of commercials, and they would revolt if it were 15/15.
You’re right that I don’t follow many pages. But I have plenty of friends, with plenty of activity (and I don’t check FB often, so there’s a lot they could show me when I do).
I get a normal amount of ads on Instagram, but half of them are for tshirts with a video of a shirtless fat guy, and the other half are for Viagra. It ignores me every time I dismiss them.
Ads shown were up 21% last quarter on minimal user growth to make up for cost per ad going down 17% according to earnings report. Facebook is absolutely shoving as much ads in as they can at this point.
Interesting that cost per ad went down. I wonder what happened to the click-through-rate as users had so many more ads shoved in their faces.
It's possible that ads are now cheaper, but also less effective. I only ever did pay per click because impressions mean nothing to a startup that no one has ever heard of. But it was always hard to break out of the default settings that were pay per impression.
Update: today I was shown 8 ads in a row on FB. The first two ads were for the same storage company (but at different locations). I was shocked to see this pairing, as well as the sheer magnitude of the back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back ads. I took a screen capture video, if you want to see it.
Makes me wonder if the troubles at Meta run deeper than the current layoffs will solve.
Meta is lame company that’s never had a good product or an original idea. They stole the idea of Friendster/MySpace and used anticompetitive tactics to monopolize. Instagram is sort of cool, but that was just an acquisition. They are the first company that comes to mind when I hear Peter Thiel talk about stagnation. Not that the other fangs are impressive, but Facebook is by far the most underwhelming of the lot. All that money and talent and what have they built. 15 years later and it’s still just a MySpace data mining advertising machine.
What ways have they been anti-competitive? I hear lots of people refer to fb specifically as a monopoly, and talk about the need to break them up or punish them for behavior. Compared to other fangs, I don’t know what they’ve done? I’m not denying it but genuinely curious what people have to say.
Eg Apple has taken heat for its restrictions on App stores and the double standards they impose on competitors. I’ve also heard of Google slowing down YouTube on competitors browsers to push chrome.
I can’t think of any direct anticompetitive behavior beyond building a product that benefits from the network affect.
They've bought their way into controlling the majority of the social media space with the acquisitions of IG and WhatsApp. TikTok has helped put a dent on that, but outside the US (and its strange fixation for the colour of the online messages' background) they still control almost all the private messaging space (of course, I'm ignoring markets like China and Russia, where there are other things at play).
If you look globally they built initiatives like "internet.org" or "free basics" where they pay telcos to make access to Facebook/Meta sites free. In those markets calling somebody on a phone is expensive, but WhatsApp is free. Looking up a business's website costs expensive data traffic, but checking the business's Facebook page is free. Big pockets finding to make Facebook the internet.
Good point. React is extremely popular. I give them points for that. But when I compare react against say the many technologies that have come from google, I’m still pretty underwhelmed.
I wish we had more insight into who these companies are actually laying off. Is Meta letting go of engineers? Data scientists? Pro* managers? Bus drivers? Content moderators?
I was spared in the Nov 2022 layoff but decided to find another gig anyway and started elsewhere in January. The difference for my mental health has been night and day. Constant talk about "increased intensity" (what does that mean? I already thought I was working pretty hard), layoffs rumors with no official clarification, PSC stack ranking. No thanks, it just wasn't for me.
I was in the exact same situation. I loved my team at Meta and learned a ton, but after the increased intensity QA from Zuck I went through two rounds of re-structuring and was shuffled to new teams. I found that I didn't have the motivation to learn the specific implementation of the huge layers of abstraction the new team was creating.
Couple this with a general questioning my life goals and if I want to spend more of it on making ad serving slightly better. I was left searching. I've landed at a new gig and I've been so much happier despite a sizable pay cut at my new role.
In general, while it clearly created huge turmoil, I wonder if one large round where you potentially cut too deep would be better on company health than many smaller rounds. I'd be curious if the sentiment of engineers at Twitter is now more positive then that at Meta.
Yeah, I had similar experiences with multiple reorgs and shuffles. I was only there for a year and had 4 separate managers. After the newest one I said enough is enough, I was just tired of perpetually reevaluating priorities and roadmapping. Time to actually do some work. Glad you're happy in your new gig too, talking with others who have left it seems our story is not uncommon.
When I see leadership positions talk about "refocusing" or "intensity" it comes across as extremely disingenuous. If you weren't focused or working before, well what were you doing?
I think it's by known that layoffs will lead to more voluntary quitting. I wouldn't be surprise if half of the reason for "increased intensity" is to get more people to leave without paying severance.
After all these layoffs, I really wonder if people will take the risk again in these companies just for the sake of `I'm a MAANG employee`. But as the hype still remains with all these Youtube videos and all I guess the dream will still be there even with the risks that are there.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 273 ms ] thread"Meta is planning another round of layoffs, I can unfortunately confirm. Leadership has been coy both internally and externally about what is coming, but I’m told that the current plan is to announce more cuts in March after last year’s performance bonuses are paid out. Given what I’ve heard about plans to cut certain orgs by double-digit percentages, I wouldn’t be surprised if the total number is somewhere in the ballpark of the last layoff, which was about 11,000 people or 13 percent of the company."
Or this outage today https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/story/twitter-outage-tw... because that one was brief
YOu might be talking about this one https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/14/23215529/twitter-down-out...
…or maybe this one https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/16/twitter_okays_cannabi...
It’s sort of hard to tell because everything’s working so well and is so fine that there are quite a few outages to choose from.
I’m a fan of small focused teams. This ain’t how that happens.
Not sure what you mean "running fine", I'm dreading opening Twitter links because it got so frustrating... It's attrition, it's slowly degrading.
It's definitely breaking, in my experience.
Not sure if that's actually caused by the recent changes as opposed to confirmation bias or merely the renewed attention that Twitter recently got.
I wouldn't comment on their moderation being better or worse since the acquisition considering they were already at zero as they couldn't even regex-out very obvious crypto scam tweets in reply to high-profile accounts.
> I'm dreading opening Twitter links because it got so frustrating
Me too, though that has nothing to do with the acquisition and was just as bad as before - something to do with justifying having dozens/hundreds of frontend engineers so they shipped a monster weighing megabytes to display ~300 characters of text.
And you can't have SMS 2FA and the employees can't have Slack anymore because they can't afford it.
Did you think the servers would shut themselves off? Of course it's still running. But if you think twitter is running fine you're self selecting news and are ignoring reality.
There might be some exceptions for those working on Oculus, but it's not a blanket exception.
It used to be similar in finance, where getting that internship at Mckinsey/Bain/BCG or in BIG4 (deloitte, ey, kpmg, pwc) meant something - in some countries it was like 1000 candidates per 1 place. But I feel it is much fewer nowadays.
I'd imagine that 4 years from now having OpenAI on your resume will be a much better signal than Google, if only for the reason that there are only 400 people who can claim OpenAI as their background.
This is why prestigious universities don't invest in increasing class sizes. The student demand is there. There is no lack of world class professors to hire, and larger facilities could be built. An Ivy league is capable of reaching 10x enrollment in 20 years while raising tuition and providing the same quality of education. However, within 50 years the brand will carry less prestige.
Engineer productivity mattered a lot less, because straight out of university it’s not like I knew enough to be productive from the start anyway.
Compensation-wise, finance tech pays a lot better, although is most cases it is a WLB tradeoff.
IYKYK
If it matters I'm in my early 40s and I have left money on the table in the past because of said idealism, but if I were to be a 20-something again and especially in today's market I'm not sure I would do the same thing.
What’s the moral hazard? For reference, moral hazard doesn’t mean “working at an immoral company”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard
Building such a machine (Instagram, FB, WhatsApp, etc) poses a grave danger to a free society if misused, but Meta will not be the ones directly harmed when the databases they built are misused in bulk by the state to commit mass human rights violations or other atrocities.
Could you clarify for someone out of the loop; I always thought Zuck was portrayed as socially awkward.
And how can you be more self righteous than Elon's friends who just tweet about "the woke mind virus" all day?
But a second... that portends a third... and a general collapse of tech a la the dotcom crash.
I had't been too worried yet, despite feeling lucky to have dodged the customary 7% at my company, but this news is starting to make me worry. Hopefully it's just Meta being in a uniquely bad position.
Even if you treat people as completely disposable garbage, it doesn't even make any sense in terms of projects, to urgently come up with projects for 10k+ people then urgently cancel them. Again, these are decades-old, established, money-making companies.
I have never understood layoffs, especially where the companies start re-hiring immediately after. I was at a startup that did insane hiring and then performed layoffs. They pitched it as employees not performing, but what had really happened is that the upper management overhired because of growth hype and then never correctly trained and onboarded employees. I didn't get laid off, but I literally got moved from one team to a new team only for the new team to be disbanded and merged back into my original team, all within like four months. Even with all that going on, I got switched between projects like every month. Like, how is your planning that bad that that happens?
Now the 7% at your company has me truly worried.
It’s well known, clueless comments on HN notwithstanding.
> We’ll pay employees during the full notification period (minimum 60 days).
> We’ll also offer a severance package starting at 16 weeks salary plus two weeks for every additional year at Google, and accelerate at least 16 weeks of GSU vesting.
It feels like Windows Mobile. Meta has the early start, money, captive audience and enthusiasm, but they don't have the hardware/software edge (that Apple coincidentally also has this time around) to really make the idea work. The headsets are not going to revolutionize much running Facebook games on budget Qualcomm SoCs, and Facebook cant buy an Unreal Engine or an M2 Pro overnight.
https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1619818349525086208?s=...
From internal emails from Zuck^. Also has a bonus glimpse into their VR/AR strategy
It would do a lot of harm to Unity's relationship with smaller developers though, to Godot's benefit.
"An innovation brand comes from building tangible new products. Our work in VR/AR is the best example we have. Our core social networking work is no longer new, Internet.org is extending something rather than inventing it, and AI is not yet tangible... succeeding in VR/AR has the most innovation potential in the next 5-10 years."
> AI is not yet tangible
Did Meta bet on the wrong horse?
Snapdragon 8 Gen 2: 12726 (76 fps)
A16 Bionic: 9827 (58 fps)
https://nanoreview.net/en/soc-compare/qualcomm-snapdragon-8-...
Phones with A16 were available in September 2022.
Phones with a SM8550 (Snapdragon 8 gen 2) were available in January, 2023.
You're saying it is unreasonable to compare the last two (4 months apart), and instead the valid comparison is between the first two (8 months apart). That doesn't seem fair.
Samsung/Qualcomm used to do the "June release / Sep available" model about 10 - 12 years ago, they always lose to Apple from every aspect. So instead of directly compete with the "in cycle" release for the holiday season, they made the release looks earlier in the year, but then compete with a product released last year for the holiday season.
I was a bit dubious about the benchmarks posted earlier in the thread, for the last decade we're used to Apple having such a long lead that timing didn't matter. But given how hard you're pushing this "it's unfair to compare the currently available phones" angle, I guess the benchmarks are legit and they really have lost the lead.
There’s about 7 million PS5s sold in the last quarter and about 1 million Quest 2s sold in Q2 last year. I somehow doubt that every one of, or even 1/7th of those PS5 owners will spend the cost of a console on PSVR so I would argue that it’s still very much Meta’s game to lose.
Edit: clarified the sales numbers are for a single quarter. The point is that even if there’s a lot of potential buyers for the PSVR I don’t think there will be nearly enough conversions.
You put either of them on to play games. That’s it. Where’s the market differentiator?
To a common person, they’re not going to see the differences that exist. They will say “oh Timmy wants to play VR” and get whatever option they can to allow Timmy to play VR. Both the Quest and PSVR2 are options for that.
And the Quest has been out longer, has an existing user base 1/7th of a PS5 and doesn’t cost the same price as a new console. All of those very much work in it’s favor.
They made a solid move into vr. But vr will be gaming well before it is anything else. To try and break into that market as anything else is just not a likely entry.
Can you break into a market with money? Sure. Microsoft did it. They are still a distant 3rd in that market.
If only consoles could be used for more "workstation" things, including VR. I would have killed for a windows/linux desktop with a PS5 or XSX chip and 24GB-32GB of unified RAM.
VR is not good at general computing yet, and the form factor and way you engage with it means people won't be using it in the same way they use TVs, game consoles or smart phones. Mass adoption takes apealing to the lowest common denominator and VR doesn't do that, which is eventually going to be an issue of fashion as much as utility.
No one wants to sit on a bus in a Quest headset, no one wants to sit alone when their friends are in the same room, no one wants to look like a dork at work. Mass adoption is no where near happening to the current state of the art, we have more technology leaps and form factor pivots before we arrive at something a mass adopted social network would work, let alone something aiming to replace segments of business and commerce use cases.
Once we hit a certain point with the form factor, quite a wide range of use cases will become a no-brainer (for example, sitting on the bus with it).
You'd use an $800 device (with limited awareness of your surroundings) on the bus?
and it's not just the crime angle, it's things like not missing your stop or being aware of the people moving around you so that you're not a nuisance.
Bonus points for the experience being transformed into a Hogwarts Bus journey.
A perfect match and around the corner too.
The oculus go failed terribly, because no-one made content for it. Microsoft's attempt at arm laptops failed, because no-one made applications for it. Apple was able to convince people it was worth considering arm, maybe they can get people to consider vr?
I'm not sure I'd phrase it this way. What Apple did was just great engineering and planning, along with a user focus. Also the fact that it was either embrace ARM or leave. :)
What I mean by that is, they launched their ARM/Apple Silicon line of computers and cut off their ties with Intel. They managed to get people buying the new ARM computers by providing an excellent user experience and incredibly good backwards compatibility with the older Intel binaries via Rosetta2. They also started rolling back some of their unpopular decisions of prior years - namely dropping all but USB-C ports and MagSafe. They also started providing Pro laptops without the dreaded TouchBar (yes, some people like it but I don't think numbers are much in its favour).
Then they engaged with the developer community and their users to help everybody transition.
They did no such thing. They forced their ecosystem to switch to their proprietary ARM platform + extensions.
If you look at other ecosystems, a switch hasn't happened. Cloud providers are offering ARM, but on the desktop, x86 is still top dog.
The iPhone in 2007 was not a good general computing device, and people were made fun of for looking like dorks because they stared constantly at their screens. And yet here we are, in a future where smartphones diligently satisfy all of consumer's needs and zoning out by looking at your black slab is normalized.
Also there is a precedent: decade of successful science fiction that has made people drool about the thought of VR
VR costs more and has been on the opposite trajectory: the only thing you ever hear people be excited by are a handful of games (and maybe VRChat for a few communities) and the way it requires dedicated space & excludes other people means that even the enthusiasts I know don’t really use it much. I think decades of sci-fi created some demand but I think it’s still in the Palm Pilot era, especially for the number of devices purchased by people who thought they’d use them more.
The Oculus has been out since ~2016 or so. I don't think it's a rocketship ready to take off with the right hardware or software. I'm sure there's profit to be made, better days to come, etc., but it's not going to be a smartphone.
While it's less than those two, it's still a very respectable number and incredibly high considering it doesn't have any of the major studios releasing their AAA games on it.
But there's corroborating data that suggests those numbers could be fairly accurate, such as Qualcomm saying way back in November 2021 that they shipped 10 million units of the chips that power the Quest 2[2]. And also seems to be the only number that's being reported anywhere.
[1]: https://80.lv/articles/meta-s-quest-2-has-reportedly-sold-ne...
[2]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/16/22785469/meta-oculus-que...
My feeling is that Meta is rather running away from a failing business and less running towards a new green meadow.
But for adults.. well after staring at a screen all day the last thing I want to do is stare at another screen, I'd rather lift weights or play guitar or whatever.
That said, most adults need to work in order to survive. Couple that with the fact that most jobs these days are done either directly in front of a computer or using some screen-enabled device, and it's not hard to see that most adults will have been staring at a screen all day most days.
Disclaimer: we are the devs behind VRWorkout
In the fitness space there is a huge group of people who would like to go to the gym but don't because of social anxiety. And VR fitness is already one of the major pillars for the headset manufacturers ( Meta, Pico and HTC ). So the social anxiety issue may very well be a driving factor overall
Where VR fitness does shine is the social aspect without the social anxiety.
Doing an intense full body workout with people across the globe and seeing other express their movements without having to show themselves leads to a much more relaxed an fun experience than for example a Zoom workout.
I am fully aware that this is not for everyone, that's why it's good to have options. I for one wouldn't even have the space or money to put up a peloton bike but I can temporarily allocate 2 square meters between our living room and kitchen for my calisthenics exercises in VR. And by using mixed reality I can even shrink that a bit further.
It's probably a bit hard to explain with only words so here is a short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WGOZlFXjQU
To me these are proofs of concept that meta verse is a real thing. The open questions are if these experiences will eventually transition to VR, or if traditional form factors are immersive enough; and if Facebook can make a more compelling experience than the existing services.
It felt so detached, and the interviewer was very mellow, only saying that perhaps the cost is a problem, but the Meta guy insisted that it's needed so they have to find the money.
I mean, I've been to Palo Alto, and its crazy... but not that crazy.
Imagine the kind of pearl clutching you would find in The Guardian if Zuck built something closer to VR Chat or Roblox.
To reach the scifi potential of VR, you need to be able to put on your VR headset, recline in a comfy chair, and then run and jump around a virtual world without moving your body.
As long as you need a controller or to physically walk around your living room, it's a neat trick, but a limited one.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/the-inside-story-of-...
There are some other good articles I remember reading about Pioneer Studios that I am unable to find right now. I think Microsoft could have absolutely dominated the mobile space, but they really sat on their laurels for far too long. I think they had the talent and ability to handle the technology development. They just didn't want to because of Gates and Ballmer.
Famously, Facebook "missed mobile" (were focused on the web) and had to scramble to recover, which they did very well. I see the metaverse efforts as a way to avoid that happening to them again. Which is smart. The point is not to make any money on the hardware; the point is to understand the metaverse so well that when it eventually emerges they will know it better than anyone else and can dominate rather than be squeezed out.
In other words, under this model, Apple's release of some excellent headset would help meta, not threaten it.
All that being said I don't think Meta will succeed. The biggest problem is bootstrap: headsets are clunky and nobody wants to wear them for long, if at all. Because it's early days everybody needs to provide transitional interfaces, but by doing so you are working against learning / predicting what will really happen (remember all those virtual worlds in the early days of the web where you would supposedly move around in a virtual mall? Nobody wants that; they want to jump straight from gap.com to Merrils.com (or in HN case from VScode to Stack Overflow and back), or visit them side-by-side. But the company's efforts are still "me too" like demos from others years ago. They haven't managed to move the state of the art; and if they had would people have booed it too? Probably.
Also, decent, non-enthusiast hardware is so far away that it will be difficult for Meta to maintain focus. It should have been a skunkworks project, or at least a side effort, not something as prominent as it has been.
Except they dont understand it...
We already have pseudo-metaverses in Minecraft, Fortnite, and such, and Meta (so far) is entirely missing the point in their own VR game. Its like they are an AI that has literally forgotten what it is like to be a regular human.
Wow, that's actually a really good comparison!
I don't think they have any concrete "idea" either, except "let's make some metaverse".
VR in the Enterprise just isn't good business sense. The ROI isn't going to be there for an enterprise use case with typical office workers/professionals. As ruthless as it sounds, eliminating the need for people with AI handling easier/simpler tasks is a much better investment that scales than purchasing, supporting and training people on VR hardware for some "productivity" benefit that really can't be defined right now.
I was gonna argue that AI doesn't exclude VR, but you are right. Employees have only so much energy to expend investigating experimental tech.
Isn’t this how insurance companies have operated since the mainframe computer age? Why would an adjuster need to talk to this with chatgpt?
[1] https://twitter.com/TitterTakeover/status/162873730347973836...
9/10 people who wants to be a manager are awful as software engineers and they know this is the only way they can stay in the game. Out of those who do become engineering managers it seems all they do is talk a bunch of nonsense and add tremendous levels of roadblocks because they suck at understanding the actual technical problems and I’ll be honest. They’re usually awful at understanding business needs too.
Get rid of eng managers.
Put in a team lead and a few people. If your teams are 20 people or something dumb just fire everyone and start over.
You don’t need battalions when the leaders aren’t even soldiers.
Just have fire teams where everyone is a soldier that reports to their team lead. These teams report to a director who is the battalion commander.
Managers should be rare. And they should be actually good at their job.
People don’t quit jobs they quit shitty terrible managers.
Nobody hurt me because for me at least, I’ve gotten every job I’ve applied to. For example I got bored of my last company and my manager, applied to four companies and got each job, then just picked the one that paid most.
I don’t like dealing with incompetent people. It’s that simple. I’m not a bottom feeder lmao.
This is one of the most irrational things I’ve ever read on here so congratulations I guess. The people in the team are not the ones to blame if the teams are too big, you are (if you are in charge). Therefore if you actually want to fix the problem, the person you need to fire before starting over is yourself.
And yes. Fire all the management who caused shit to get that bad. I 100% stand by that.
If you actually are sincere about fixing things, actually finding the causes is very important.
At some point you have to just rip it out and put a new one in.
I’m personally fine just leaving and getting a new job if things get wack. Unless I can get to senior leadership level I can’t do much when the culture is already so ingrained. That’s why you need an Elon or someone like that with guts to just come in and fire people.
Yes there are awful engineering managers just as there are great ones who are force multipliers for their teams. I've known great engineering managers who were great engineers who naturally became an interface for their teams and some who weren't very technical but were great people managers that got great outcomes for individuals and teams.
Org design, culture, complexity, needs determine the necessity of an engineering management function. Do orgs and engineering management functions become dysfunctional? Yes. Can this be resolved by just eliminating the management layer? Hardly.
I know what I'm saying, and out of a dozen plus managers I've worked with over just the last 6 years (re-orgs because they have way too much time on their hands) only 2 have been excellent, and 1 somewhat all right. It isn't my fault that even with terrible engineering managers, I managed to never get below the max rating on any performance review. I know what I know, and I'm good at it.
The bigger companies get, the worse quality of talent that comes in. Most late stage+ employees are there to rest, vest, and cruise. Don't be naive.
The worst part of this is the more and more levels of management that get put in. People start coming in who have spotty technical understandings, but talk a whole lot that sways people who only need a high level understanding of what is going on. Imo this is due to people who cannot operate efficiently nor in a lean manner. Everything needs to be overly complex for them, to prove they’re something.
Again, I'm giving my experience as a competent engineer and I at one point managed 4 people for a few months before I stopped because I was leaving meetings that were a waste of fucking time with other managers. Literally people stroking each other's ego in a passive aggressive way instead of talking business and ensuring their teams succeed. Not to mention the ways they talked about their reports and literal games on how promotions work.
I am super passionate about removing the unnecessary complexity bloat and drama that bad management leads to.
>The bigger companies get, the worse quality of talent that comes in. Most late stage+ employees are there to rest, vest, and cruise. Don't be naive.
Straw-manning much? I don't see any part of my original argument making a point to the contrary or even addressing the notion of org size.
But I'll bite -> An alternative way of looking at this dynamic in large tech orgs is, that the org sets up a game where people who play the game well can succeed (interview well, do what looks good on impact resumes and against perf rubrics ) without contributing much to the success of the org.
Blame the game not the player, the rest and vesters are resting and vesting because they are achieving optimal utility within the interview/perf/promo game the org has setup, hence dysfunctional orgs.
It's not that flat organisations/startup aren't dysfunctional or that large orgs always end up being dysfunctional but I agree with you that larger engineering orgs often tend to be dysfunctional in many similar ways.
As for the game, I’m all in. I love the game and it’s fun. I’m super competitive and have no problem going back to lobby after a bad game to find a new lobby. I’m playing ranked/hardcore/we it’s called, not single player or un ranked. I’m not a gamer so idk the terms.
As for the late stagers it’s just my observation. It’s what I have observed and they definitely spend more time doing the same things. Usually because they’re doing anything but the work. They have nothing to lose nor any tangible stake.
At small scale there’s no ego. Software engineers answer support queries and help with sales. The goal is to turn your shares from a penny or less to $100.
At late stage is when all the middle management bloat comes in.
You add more and more levels where the level above just wants high level updates. Then managers have associate, manager, sr manager levels. Then you have director, associate director, etc. each level is a sad reminder of what could have been possible. People are more concerned with becoming managers instead of contributing. It’s why many companies become stagnant imo.
Personally I’m done working at companies bigger than 5k people. I was already feeling the pain at like 2-3k people. I can’t imagine working somewhere with 50k plus people. Sounds like hell.
I think it's because you said the following:
> ... what reads like a junior engineer's half baked rant on the uselessness of engineering managers.
I agree the person you're replying to is ranting a bit, but that comes across as saying "you're wrong because you don't have enough experience".
I felt it was justified after you called their opinion a "junior's" rant.
You dispelled them as giving a rant that denotes inexperience. They gave their experience as a counter.
My managers are very good. They act somewhat in-between a coach and a secretary, and never muddle in technical details that they don’t understand. They try doing small-chunked tasks that don’t fit a developer’s schedule.
the director level (it could be multiple people) receive leadership objectives for the quarter or year. Their only job is to take their resources/battalion and divvy the work up into small atomic fire teams. Obviously there are many players from UX product QA devops etc. There is a directive, and everyone needs to be on board to WORK.
The team lead is in charge of ensuring the eng work gets done. There might be product or other folks, they’re specialists on the team like a marksman or medic or automatic weapons specialist. This is a tech company we are taking about, the output is a product backed by technology.
They need to be strong technically and take their team to the finish line. They don’t need to waste their time with 1:1 where they can’t remember the last session or making up stupid stories and wasting time in meetings. Just do the work. The team lead is the best engineer on the team and the rest of the team just does their job.
Maybe incentive structure could be set up where the entire team is rewarded for completion. If people don’t feel it’s fair they can leave, but when things work out the reward would be 100s of thousands of dollars for everyone. If you just need bodies to throw at some low hanging problem outsource that work. Otherwise focus on execution.
Like imagine trying to take a building with many doors and floors from an enemy. You want each team nimble enough to move independently of each other while working together via the team leads talking to each other. They lead their teams towards their objective of taking the building.
Engineering managers would just be dead weight. They’re not in the building and don’t have line of sight. They are far away (rarely have I seen eng managers code or get their hands dirty) and because of this cause confusion and disarray. They get information that gets lost in translation or some hero noob on the team wants to try their own plan and the manager gives them time to try it out. Good luck taking that building.
Just keep the work lean, and keep focused on work.
Like so many managers allow their teams to waste time and effort with “finding the right process” or bullshit meetings. Just focus on taking that building.
You've got middle managers (directors) who link teams with leadership priorities. You've got line managers (tech leads) who are in charge of ensuring that work gets done.
I’ve been at places where there was Associate Manager, Manager, Sr Manager, Group Manager, Director, Senior Director, VP, SVP.
That is insane imo. Anyone below director is useless, and the director should just report to the VP or CTO.
My point is that managers should be rare. And teams should be small.
I’m not taking career or technical advice from an associate/manager because they’re usually the worst ICs and overall lowest performers in like 80% or more of the time. This is how they struggle to stay in the game. You have probably heard many people who are the best IC say they don’t want to manage.
They then get managed by the worst people. And they just leave like that when they can’t take their managers BS anymore.
You ever gotten feedback like “you need to speak more in meetings” from one of these low tier managers? All they do is waste everyone’s time in useless meetings. I’m there to work, not pretend I’m smart by making dumb diagrams and writing/sharing 20 page documents on things that have nothing to do with the job. You see these people come out of the woodwork during late stage. And that’s when most of the beat engineers leave and you have commodity tier folks running the show.
It’s just facts. I’m giving my perspective. And it’s frustrating that I have to keep changing jobs because management is always the weak link. People missing deadlines, people putting effort into things that don’t matter, just talking/wasting time.
Cool. Advocating for fewer layers of managers is very different than what you proposed in your original post, which included the phrase "Get rid of eng managers."
> I’m not taking career or technical advice from an associate/manager because they’re usually the worst ICs and overall lowest performers in like 80% or more of the time. This is how they struggle to stay in the game. You have probably heard many people who are the best IC say they don’t want to manage.
But you will. They'll just be called a Tech Lead and they'll have manager responsibilities.
And back when the first 1-5 billion dollar valuation was created we moved fast and operated in small teams. Since going public and hiring like 5x as many people our valuation has only gone up like 1-2x. I strongly believe that the end game folks are not very good at their jobs and love wasting time coming up with process and spending money on events.
Again I know why this happens. I’m just saying I wish it wasn’t this way. Appearances and perception.. so dumb.
Oh well time to find my next exit hopefully because I love that thrill of building and solving customer problems.
There are a lot of poor, mediocre or bad devs as well as bad managers. The solution to these problems is not to arbitrarily get rid of most of the practitioners.
There is frequently a lack of humility and self awareness in dev culture I'm afraid to say. It was one of the things that made me leave the profession.
It’s also immediately clear when a dev is bad, but managers will weasel out of their responsibility and blame the devs, despite constantly changing requirements, asking for the impossible, not providing the necessary information and resources, etc. a dev doesn’t sabotage a manager’s work like that.
Most managers also aren’t professionally qualified for their position. An education in accounting doesn’t make somebody a manager, just like computer science doesn’t make a dev a team leader.
What's the difference between a team lead and a manager?
The problem is Meta's headsets have a very core-gamer focused audience left over from the Oculus days, though they've started to pivot away from this in recent years. It's nowhere near ready for a mainstream audience to use for social connections. The headsets are too bulky, the interface is too complicated, and the apps require too much setup, character creation, and are just too involved. Nothing right now passes the grandma test.
I don’t know how they’re going to translate that reach to VR profits either, but focusing on Facebook-using retirees misses the big picture of Meta’s growth.
Meta’s apps have 3.7 billion active monthly users. That’s half the population of the world! It’s impossible to guess their behavioral trends based only on what you and I see around us.
Even Facebook is growing despite nearly a decade of HN users declaring it’s only used by retirees and will soon die out.
They usually "take full responsibility and the heavy burden" of doing the layoffs. It's like they are the ones suffering more. It's heart breaking.
The point is, it has nothing to do with having money in the bank to pay them.
I am $50MM+/year spender on Meta ads and while I know that ad load is up I don't think its up that much where ads run alongside each other.
If you can show me evidence of this I will make a big fucking deal of this to Meta.
Post, ad, post, ad, reels (which I've never intentionally clicked), ad, 3 posts, (ad, 2 posts) repeated indefinitely.
My wife, through the Facebook app, had a roughly similar pattern, though with far more suggested groups.
I typically bail when I see two in a row, in a vain attempt to send the message that multiple ads back-to-back is not cool.
edit: just logged in and of the first 20 timeline items, 9 were ads (including two cases of back-to-back ads). It's basically half of what I see.
I wonder if you don't follow a lot of pages or something, so it's breaking the algorithm.
It's possible that ads are now cheaper, but also less effective. I only ever did pay per click because impressions mean nothing to a startup that no one has ever heard of. But it was always hard to break out of the default settings that were pay per impression.
Makes me wonder if the troubles at Meta run deeper than the current layoffs will solve.
Eg Apple has taken heat for its restrictions on App stores and the double standards they impose on competitors. I’ve also heard of Google slowing down YouTube on competitors browsers to push chrome.
I can’t think of any direct anticompetitive behavior beyond building a product that benefits from the network affect.
The React framework is a pretty good product that originated from them.
Was the irony intentional, or just a happy accident?
Couple this with a general questioning my life goals and if I want to spend more of it on making ad serving slightly better. I was left searching. I've landed at a new gig and I've been so much happier despite a sizable pay cut at my new role.
In general, while it clearly created huge turmoil, I wonder if one large round where you potentially cut too deep would be better on company health than many smaller rounds. I'd be curious if the sentiment of engineers at Twitter is now more positive then that at Meta.
Don't drink cool aid. Twitter case is not yet settled. Musk bought Twitter as company-in-crisis, and crisis was not about excess workforce...