React and PyTorch.
For everyone hating on the company, they did more for software engineers than any other company. The most meritocratic and highly compensated
I agree with the pushing up pay point. That was good, though it appears to be ending now.
1. Virtual Dom 2. One way data binding
I think one could argue that the virtual DOM wasn’t important, and possibly even led the industry in the wrong direction considering how it’s not as popular, for good reasons, anymore.
One way data binding was huge, however. Every other framework at the time was proudly promoting 2 way data binding. 2 way data binding would be in their website’s hero image and their entire sample app (invariably a todo list app) would be based around promoting the benefits of 2 way data binding.
I think minus React, a switch to one way data binding would have taken much longer, simply because the momentum behind 2 way data binding was so strong.
That whole concept is severely busted. The ancient Greeks knew some part of success was just luck - I have no idea why these ideas which started off being used as a joke, or a dystopian pejorative term, got taken seriously.
"Pull yourself up by your bootstraps" is another - try it. It's physically impossible! The term started as a JOKE.
But there's this sector of people who honestly believe their success says something about them, but they give nothing back to their community and offer nothing to Luck.
Wild.
Kevin Kruse wrote a book about that a few years ago and anyone familiar with American politics or religion will recognize a lot of the people involved:
An injury to one is an injury to all.
All of these CEOs are nuts. They are all greedy. The capitalism-to-the-max model is less than great… but those of us in software are treated amazingly well.
I agree these people should pay for their bad decisions but some of those decisions gave us equity grants, sky high salaries, and free meals. We can’t act like we haven’t benefited.
Also I’ll eat my hat if his bet on VR/AR is not going to pay put eventually.
Additionally, it’s not clear if any gains Meta would see would be worth the cost. There’s the headline number of tens of billions of dollars spent, but more than the absolute amount of money, the opportunity cost of those dollars not being spent on other more promising technologies, like ML/AI, which Facebook actually was THE leader in 5-10 years ago, is the big problem, and is directly a result of poor leadership.
He lacks vision. No, he’s an antithesis to innovation.
I can absolutely see why staffers are losing trust. Mark is treating this as if everyone already agrees with the idea.
Just, unbelievably callous.
Every major tech company (except Apple) is doing the same because they overhired to an incredible extent.
Mind you, these companies were already bloated before the pandameic hiring, partly because of a strategy to drain talent from the startups ecosystem.
I always lie in those internal surveys.
he's never heard of a strike
While I understand that gradual layoffs are less risky and easier for the organization to absorb, it seems short-sighted.
Delaying the inevitable will only cause more pain and damage in the long term.
It could be argued that it's reasonable to aim for pre-pandemic employee levels, given the drop in valuation, post-pandemic revenue decrease, and the significant loss in revenue from Apple's privacy changes.
This is just speculation and should be taken with a grain of salt. To achieve pre-pandemic employee levels, Facebook would need to cut an additional 20K employees.
If the objective is to boost efficiency and reduce expenses while minimizing negative impacts on the product, one can establish metrics to evaluate the outcome.
By examining metrics such as feature velocity, revenue, SRE, and usage, I believe you'll find the answer to your question.
I ruthlessly unfollow people who post garbage links on FB and only follow who post their own content so I find my FB feed to be surprisingly sane and helps me keep in touch with people I've met throughout the years in all the cities I've ever lived in, which is not a few.
Despite younger people and curmudgeons retreating from FB -- no concern of mine since my own social network of people my age is what I care about (and one day soon the IG and TikTok crowd will learn that they are old school grandpas too and that they're the MySpace of their generation) -- I find I can still tell stories with pictures and words on FB better than any other platform except blogs, but no one follows blogs these days. IG stories are too short, posts are too limited (you can't caption individual pictures), and TikTok requires you to sit through a 15s video.
Because I ruthlessly unfollow garbage, I don't think I've seen a political post or any divisive content in years. Instead I've gotten to "travel" with friends to different countries, gotten updates on their kids and their struggles with growing older, volunteer efforts that they're part of, etc.
FB is still useful for those of us who use it correctly, and for those of us for whom the written word is still more important the pictures or videos.
/s
Why should a worker be motivated to do work if by the next day they could be gone?
No one could possibly concentrate enough to do good work with the loomimg axe.
I don't care if you're writing code or flipping burgers the distraction is mind-numbing.
Note also that most layoffs will be non engineers.
We might not go back to that dire of a situation, but I imagine it will be closer than we have been for quite some time. A lot of people see Zuckerberg as being an asshole, where really he is going above and beyond by being this communicative.
To be a CEO, you have to be a bastard sometimes. You don't have a choice. The trick is in the execution.
Imo it’s great and reflects what I saw from him when I used to work there.
All your posts in this thread read like you are head of FB PR.
However what people are upset about now is that is another huge layoff was announced only a few months later. The first one was supposed to be "deep" enough.
Given his experience presumably killing a variety of animals, I wouldn't be too anxious to take him on.
Not sure what you're trying to get at. He eats meat and wants to respect where it came from rather than grabbing a factory raised, killed, and processed McRib and not thinking about it.
That sounds like the right way to me if you're going to eat meat. Personally I think it's a bigger problem when someone doesn't know or care (especially if they don't want to know/care) how the meat ended up on their plate.
Do you truly believe that someone who would kill and butcher an animal is a threat to _you_?
If this is some attempt to squeeze people back to to office, well they can forget about it. I'd leave tech before I move my family for a company that has a record of cutting people.
I’m thinking that as she went more and more into background, Facebook lost more and more focus. But maybe it’s just me.
https://www.businessinsider.com/why-suns-logo-is-on-the-back...
Great answer for shareholders.
Not the answer employees are looking for when trying to understand if their job will continue to exist. Especially when front-line engineers don’t have as much control over whether or not their project succeeds in the market as the execs and product people do.
> short-term cost savings provided by a layoff are overshadowed by bad publicity, loss of knowledge, weakened engagement, higher voluntary turnover, and lower innovation
1 - https://hbr.org/2022/12/what-companies-still-get-wrong-about...
I remember fighting against Chinese groups criticizing western medias and talking about how tiananmen massacre is a hoax while Mark was publicly reprimanding the people who would scratch the “black” of “black lives matter” from some of the walls of the office to overwrite it with “all”.
During all that time the American people hated fb. HN couldn’t comprehend how engineers could accept to join and work at facebook. The social dilemma came out on Netflix.
As someone who really liked the facebook app and thought it would continue to change the world in a good way, it was really hard to read about the company externally and to see employees destroying it from the inside.
I think my opinion now is that 1) any type of organization becomes problematic once it gets too large/accumulates too much power (religion and the government are much more of a problem than Meta though) and 2) politics shouldn’t be allowed internally. People shouldn’t “come to work as themselves”. People really suck and they should keep a lot of things to themselves.
