[HN Gopher] The last three years of my work will be permanently ...
___________________________________________________________________
The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned
Author : chubot
Score : 379 points
Date : 2022-11-30 17:36 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ericlippert.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ericlippert.com)
| moloch-hai wrote:
| To Management, you are either in a Cost Center or a Profit
| Center. In all advertising-supported monstrosities, only adtech
| and sales are profit centers. Literally everything else is a cost
| center. Everyone at Facebook and Google is in a Cost Center if
| they are not directly involved in landing advertising accounts,
| presenting ads, or billing for ads.
|
| Never look for work in a Cost Center.
|
| Come hard times, Cost Centers are cut first. Not because it is
| good for the business, but because cutting payroll impresses Wall
| Street, inflating stock valuation. To Wall Street, layoffs mean
| you are serious.
| gknoy wrote:
| > billing for ads is in a Cost Center.
|
| I've only briefly worked closely with a billing team, but my
| impression was always that billing is seen less as a cost
| center, but more as a critical "without this team we get no
| money" team, which seems closer to a profit center. I'm not
| sure how far up the management team that perspective stays
| true, though.
| trenchgun wrote:
| Full quote: "Everyone at Facebook and Google not directly
| involved in landing advertising accounts, presenting ads, or
| billing for ads is in a Cost Center."
|
| You read it wrong.
| moloch-hai wrote:
| I have patched it to be harder to mis-read.
| squokko wrote:
| > Speaking of cutting costs, the company is still pouring
| multiple billions of dollars into vaporware called "the
| metaverse". News flash: no one wants to wear VR goggles to spend
| any time in a digital heaven where the role of God is played by
| Mark Zuckerberg and you can do anything you can imagine,
| including "work" and "shop".
|
| The hedge fund guys would say the same about your team. I know
| you are emotional but this is uncalled for.
| svnt wrote:
| Are... are you attempting to shame-discipline him? You non-seq
| a hedge fund and then appeal to morality? What a strange little
| comment.
| samiam_iam wrote:
| Boohoo
| aaron695 wrote:
| Kiro wrote:
| > News flash: no one wants to wear VR goggles to spend any time
| in a digital heaven where the role of God is played by Mark
| Zuckerberg and you can do anything you can imagine, including
| "work" and "shop".
|
| I'm sure no-one here likes the idea of the Metaverse but from
| Meta's perspective I definitely think it's the correct bet. This
| doesn't make it less dystopian but that's exactly the point. If
| they can pull it off they win. Great video explaining it way
| better then I can: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqkhjL3WvWQ
| WorldMaker wrote:
| I haven't watched this particular video yet, but a similar
| explainer video that I came across this week has me feeling a
| lot like "Those who have forgotten Second Life seemed doomed to
| repeat it (badly)". I had a bit of a rough moment realizing
| that statistically most of the engineers at Meta are probably
| too young to remember Second Life. (And some of the ones that
| are old enough like Mark Zuckerberg were too busy in other
| parts of the internet to have learned the realest lessons,
| which were not technical but sociopolitical.)
| wanderingstan wrote:
| By writing this post, does the author violate the non-
| disparagement clause of any severance agreement? Or perhaps they
| are set financially so can turn down the severance?
| grepfru_it wrote:
| Or, more likely, op didn't get severance
| [deleted]
| kalkin wrote:
| "Everyone was kind, smart, dedicated, thoughtful, generous with
| their time and knowledge, and a genuine pleasure to work with."
|
| I know this is what everyone says after leaving a company if they
| don't want to burn bridges, and I bet it's even fairly true to
| Eric's experience. I'm also entirely sympathetic to his
| frustration with both the immediate experience of being laid off
| for any reason and the broader large-organization irrationality
| about costs.
|
| And yet. We're talking about Facebook, a company whose impact on
| the world is very hard to see as net positive, from teen mental
| health to national politics. I just really wish it was the
| industry norm that people who are, in local ways, genuinely
| _thoughtful_ and _kind_ , and have many employment options, would
| also think seriously about what their work is ultimately
| building.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| This is something I still find as kind of a culture shock on HN
| honestly. The idea that pursuing work that is personally
| interesting and remunerative is _at worst neutral_ is basically
| an in-built assumption here. There is often pretty intense
| policing of it if there 's a whiff of deviation.
|
| FWIW I don't think it's true either. A lot of engineers can be
| convinced to work on basically anything if it's "a hard
| problem" in the right way. This is bad. We should all consider
| ourselves responsible for the end results, rather than entitled
| to the means.
| kalkin wrote:
| Right. I've seen this parodically phrased as "I just make the
| rockets go up, it's the Luftwaffe's business where they come
| down" and I don't get that attitude at a gut level but it's
| clearly common (even if people don't like to imagine
| themselves in that particular scenario).
| chubot wrote:
| (story submitter here) This is true and should be acknowledged.
| To be honest, I submitted it because like many others I learned
| something from the author's blog, and followed it over the
| years
|
| I also submitted it under a title involving "probabilistic
| programming languages", thinking "it's cool that you can get
| paid to work on such a thing"
|
| Though it's also true that I don't use Facebook and would
| probably not want it to be optimized any more than it is :-/
|
| I also worked in Big tech and there is a lot of genuinely
| useful knowledge and practice "locked up" there -- i.e.
| knowledge that is not in open source code. They have assembled
| a lot of expertise
|
| The P programming language (for concurrency / state machines)
| is another example of that -- it's used inside Microsoft
| Windows and AWS, and is beyond the state of the art elsewhere.
|
| I don't know what to do about that, but it should be
| acknowledged. We should also acknowledge that some big tech
| products are great and world changing in a largely positive way
| (even though in my personal opinion Facebook is the least of
| those, I can also see it argued the other way).
| hunter-gatherer wrote:
| I've brought this up a few times and the response is usually
| against me. I feel the same way, although I understand that
| people need to work and people need to get paid. I've worked
| jobs that probably had little if any positive net impact on
| society. I'd contend that net-positive industries are actually
| a small minority. Just because something provides a
| consumed/demanded product doesn't mean that it is a net
| positive, and I think people generally aren't as good at
| diffentiating between the two.
| tasuki wrote:
| I use Facebook to keep in touch with old friends and sometimes
| people organize events and they invite me on Facebook and it
| works and makes my life a tiny bit better.
| autotune wrote:
| Then you submit a post on FB that none of these old friends
| or acquaintances like or comment on and wonder why you
| suddenly feel like a leper afterward.
| kalkin wrote:
| I used to try to do that and yet I found it was net negative
| for my mental health in practice, with infinite scroll etc.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| To touch lightly on the title:
|
| A graphics artist on a Corridor Crew YouTube video recently said
| that you must love the day-to-day of your job because a lot of
| what you make will never see the light of day. I think this is
| especially true when you are not the owner of your work's fate.
|
| This is not a criticism or judgment on Eric's feelings towards
| his work being abandoned. He seems like someone who has loved
| every minute of problem solving. And it doesn't mean you're not
| allowed to feel feelings when your work gets tossed. But it's
| something that resonated with me, and it might resonate with you
| too.
| musk_micropenis wrote:
| Sorry to hear about the lay-off. I can't stress enough how
| influential Eric Lippert was on my early career. His work on C#
| and .NET, but more importantly his openness and engagement with
| the community played a big part in me continuing on the Microsoft
| stack.
|
| Just jumping into any random month[1] in his blog archive from my
| formative years is incredible nostalgia for me. It's not the kind
| of high-concept "a monad is a monoid in the category of
| endofunctors" content that will make the front page of HN, but
| was a great pipeline of information for a junior .NET developer
| hungry to learn.
|
| [1] https://ericlippert.com/2009/08/
| nnoitra wrote:
| smcl wrote:
| Not much I can add here, I think musk_micropenis really hit the
| nail on the head
| ericlippert wrote:
| Thank you, that's kind of you to say.
| [deleted]
| ericlippert wrote:
| And thanks to all the repliers below for their kind words. My
| goal was always to share knowledge and enthusiasm and it is
| genuinely touching to know that I succeeded.
| techterrier wrote:
| ditto, thanks Eric!
| wofo wrote:
| Just wanted to say thanks too. Back when I was at the
| university, your blog helped me discover programming
| languages are something you can actually design. I even ended
| up contributing to the Rust compiler, which was an incredible
| learning experience. Thanks for the inspiration!
| mattchamb wrote:
| I also want to say thanks for exactly the same reasons
| expressed above. I learnt a lot from your writing when I was
| a junior developer just starting out in 2010.
|
| You shared a lot of insights that made the internals of the
| systems we build upon much more accessible to me and helped
| shape my relationship with all programming languages I have
| used since then.
| marcusf wrote:
| Eric, want to echo what folks are saying here. I stumbled on
| your blog in high school (ca 2003?) and you (and Raymond
| Chen) fueled so much of my passion for compilers and API
| design respectively, which dictated both my school choice and
| at least some career choices later. You were highly
| influential from afar :)
| com2kid wrote:
| Your blog was a huge influence on me, and it, along with The
| Old New Thing, led to me working at Microsoft for almost a
| decade. I learned more about software engineering and
| programming from your blog than from any set of college
| classes or textbooks, and what you taught directly impacted
| so many project I've worked on.
|
| Thank you so much, and I hope that someday in the future you
| will return to blogging!
| rjbwork wrote:
| 100% agree. Still primarily working in .NET (now core! oh wait,
| now just .NET again, lol) some 11 years on. Thanks Eric!
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > _Most of my team has found other positions and I am hopeful
| that the rest will soon._
|
| Wow, I guess I would've figured that it would take people with
| this kind of background a while to find another gig (working on
| similar things) in the current environment. So maybe things
| aren't as bad as they seem? (yet, anyway)
|
| > _But after >26 years of thinking about programming languages
| for corporations, and the last three years of my work being
| thrown away, I need a good long corporate detox before I go
| looking again._
|
| I feel this. I'm about to finish up a contract working on a
| product that's about to be killed (before ever really seeing the
| light of day) and it's kind of hard not to feel like Sisyphus at
| this point. Not really interested in looking for something else
| for a while.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| > Wow, I guess I would've figured that it would take people
| with this kind of background a while to find another gig
| (working on similar things) in the current environment. So
| maybe things aren't as bad as they seem? (yet, anyway)
|
| Finding another position doesn't mean finding another
| equivalent position.
|
| I work for a FAANG right now. If I was getting laid off I would
| get the first job I could and then keep applying to other
| companies that are more suitable to the level that I had
| before.
| dirheist wrote:
| It's the way the cookie crumbles.
| eevilspock wrote:
| _> Apologies that this is so long; I didn't have time to make it
| shorter._
|
| A paraphrase of Blaise Pascal's famous line (that is commonly
| misattributed to Mark Twain: _I would have written a shorter
| letter, but I did not have the time._
| kepler1 wrote:
| Lucky you -- I don't get more than a week before I'm told my work
| is useful, but we've moved on to other things and won't need it
| any more!
| s3000 wrote:
| > We were almost ready to be spun off.
|
| What was missing? If the team is that good, why don't they
| believe in themselves and offer their services?
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| UweSchmidt wrote:
| Damn, even the top performers are jaded and checking out. Someone
| has to keep _believing_ , no?
| dathinab wrote:
| As someone not in the topic the metaverse seems even worse, i.e.
| it looks like Facebook spent 20 Billion and didn't manage to add
| anything to VR other small companies haven't added years
| earlier...
|
| I'm probably missing something, but it honestly looks worse then
| burning money, it looks like extremely inefficiently burning
| money.
|
| Anyway sounded like an interesting work before the team was
| dissolved.
| MikusR wrote:
| Good standalone headsets were a thing before Quest?
| dathinab wrote:
| depending on your standards, yes
|
| but also very expensive
| jfengel wrote:
| In theory you're missing the network effect of everyone already
| being on Facebook. So they can quickly spin up a vast virtual
| world with all the people you know already in it.
|
| In practice, it hasn't happened, and nobody seems excited to do
| it. Whatever benefits they hope to get from the network effect
| seem unlikely thus far.
| nottorp wrote:
| In practice VR is still at the early adopter stage and
| techies who would buy into it are more aware of what a
| Facebook account requirement means.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Facebook's popular and people use it a lot because you can
| use it on the shitter or in line at the grocery store or for
| five minutes in bed when you briefly wake up at 3AM or while
| feeding the baby or while not paying attention in a boring
| meeting or under your desk while you're pretending to work or
| on the subway.
|
| No metaverse will be anywhere near as popular as Facebook
| proper if it can't match that feature. Even one that's _built
| on_ Facebook. This entire sector is software R &D that's
| being done in anticipation of eventually hardware
| breakthroughs that'll make it not-suck--so right now, it
| kinda sucks, and there's no getting around that until the
| hardware gets a _lot_ nicer.
| dathinab wrote:
| Through in my experience no one but old people is actually on
| facebook. (EDIT: In the country where I live.)
|
| A lot of middle aged people might still have an account
| because old people and aged contacts but don't really want to
| use it.
|
| And this scenario still requires most people to have a VR
| headset which doesn't make them sick and is comfortable and
| easy to use, which is not just technically still a bit off
| AFIK but also has tricky problems. Like a lot of people have
| glasses, including many "non trivial" ones and just the act
| of needing to replace glasses with contact lenses makes it
| "annoying" and that is iff you can have contact lenses.
|
| Then it needs to be lightweight, but also fast and to be
| charged but can't have a large battery and a cable is also
| annoying and needs high enough frequency/resolution but also
| cheap and must not get too war either. Also while it needs to
| be cheap it also must fit all kinds of head sizes and form
| very well so you kinda both need and must not have a one size
| fits all solution.
|
| And even if you add all of that up it still holds that for a
| lot of tasks text/images is still best. I thats why most
| websites and apps are still "2d" today it's just more
| practical.
|
| So it's a bit like video calls, but needing a specialized
| device instead of just your phone/laptop/AIO PC.
|
| So for it to work IMHO you would need to do something like
| replacing phones with hybrid VR/AR glasses which are
| technological a jump comparable to the last 10(or more)
| years. And have hand tracking in the glasses as an camera.
| And convince most people to run around with glasses all the
| time (good luck). And convince people that using a facbook
| controlled device with camera and mic in nearly every part of
| their live both offline and online.
|
| So it's possible, but especially for Facebook it's hard and I
| think they went all-in ~5-10 years to early. IMHO Apple has
| much better chances to take over that space, and if they do
| it right not limited to Apple users.
| dibt wrote:
| > News flash: no one wants to wear VR goggles to spend any time
| in a digital heaven where the role of God is played by Mark
| Zuckerberg and you can do anything you can imagine, including
| "work" and "shop".
|
| I could say the same thing about TikTok, Twitch, Instagram,
| Whatsapp, Youtube, WeChat, etc.
|
| I'm not bullish on the metaverse. I live simply, with less tech
| than the average person. I don't expect to participate. With that
| said, I don't doubt it will be more successful than what
| graybeards expect. More than what Meta is dumping into it? No
| idea.
|
| There will be things in the future you will not want to
| participate in. That's ok.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| There's a difference between you personally not using WhatsApp
| and you saying "no one wants to use WhatsApp".
| georgeburdell wrote:
| I'm probably not as talented as the author, but I can't relate to
| this feeling of giving up because some work won't be used. I have
| been working for ten years post-PhD and every single product I've
| ever worked on has been canned, sometimes very circuitously via
| acquisitions. My work is trade secret so I've never filed a
| patent, written a publication, nor given a talk. I have zero
| outwardly observable accomplishments. My resume and LinkedIn
| rolodex are the only testaments that I've done anything at all.
|
| And yet I don't see myself retiring once I have enough money in a
| few years
| 300bps wrote:
| _I can't relate to this feeling of giving up because some work
| won't be used_
|
| Everyone is motivated by different things. My strongest
| motivation and satisfaction comes from implementing technology
| to make drastic and lasting positive change in the work done by
| other people. Agile development methodology with iterative
| development and meaningful change every couple weeks suits me
| very well.
|
| What you described as your work would not be fulfilling to me.
| francisofascii wrote:
| I don't think Eric is giving up or retiring, just taking a much
| needed break. We should all look up from our keyboards from
| time to time to see the bigger picture.
|
| > I need a good long corporate detox before I go looking again.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| You may not always feel that way.
|
| At some point you may start to wonder what your legacy on this
| planet is. At the very least: if you've made a good use of your
| limited time (and the scarce resource that is your labor).
| (Hard mode: if you've left the planet better off than you found
| it?)
|
| The last few years have pushed a lot of people's "burn out"
| buttons and the self-reflection of "what have I accomplished
| with my time?" (and "have I contributed more to good or to evil
| in this world?") are very easy burn out spirals to experience,
| so a lot of people are asking these sorts of questions now.
| (Including just about every day lately for months on "Ask HN",
| in a million different unique individual ways, if you've not
| yet noticed.)
|
| You sound like you are in a very fortunate place in your life
| that you aren't struggling with that right now. I envy you a
| little. I'm also glad for you and I hope it remains that way
| for you.
|
| (I've spent too much time in the last few months worried that
| too much of my precious labor into finished projects and net
| revenue generation has been spent in service to the greater
| evil than the greater good of the world and have been
| struggling to figure out what that means or what I do with that
| cursed feeling.)
| colineartheta wrote:
| How were you able to acquire a PhD without a publication?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| daveguy wrote:
| > post-PhD
| kevingadd wrote:
| I don't think it necessarily has to be about giving up, but it
| makes a lot of sense that if you already sort of hate your
| employer, them deciding to throw out a bunch of valuable work
| you did and lay you off is a good incentive to reconsider your
| current industry or at least take a break.
|
| Personally I had an entire year worth of difficult sweng work
| thrown out due to politics, and it's impossible for that not to
| negatively impact my mood (or performance reviews)!
| ska wrote:
| > but I can't relate to this feeling of giving up because some
| work won't be used.
|
| People are fulfilled by different things. Some people are far
| more interested in their working having a meaningful (to them)
| impact to the "outside" world than the specifics of the work.
| Andy_G11 wrote:
| "We were almost ready to be spun off." Prove it.
|
| Not saying that you were not a great, skilled team who added an
| immense amount of value. But could you sell what your service on
| the open market?
|
| Our world's economy is awash with great products, services,
| people and teams who could not crack the market. They could have
| been contenders, but they just did not crack it.
|
| This is the way entrepreneurship works: until you crack the
| market and make a fortune, no one really cares and no one really
| values what you have to sell. You are just a wannabe also-ran.
| Then, when (if) you make it, suddenly you are a genius who
| everybody wants to get to know - even if it is pure luck that
| things went your way, or perhaps because you said something apt
| that gelled with a major potential customer, or if daddy smoothed
| the way for you.
|
| I actually hate that good teams doing a job well hit the skids so
| that the sometimes half-baked aims of the decision makers can be
| fulfilled. I have seen many of these ideas be crap and good
| people be sacrificed to the alter of ego maniacs' ambitions.
|
| And I have great admiration for people who go it alone and let
| the market be the measure of their value.
|
| But I have limited time for crying over spilt milk and neither
| does anyone else.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| Always a big fan of Eric's blog so its sad to hear this story.
|
| I feel like MBAs need to do a better job at learning about
| selective truths. Far too many snap decisions made based on
| seeing the tip of a dataset in some corporate spreadsheet and
| assuming clarity in the data. In this case seeing the cost of
| this team and not seeing the saving its was generating for other
| teams.
|
| Or maybe it was just political as Zuckerburg slid the hatchet
| away from the Metaverse and onto things of (arguably) greater
| value.
| i_like_apis wrote:
| woah wrote:
| > Speaking of cutting costs, the company is still pouring
| multiple billions of dollars into vaporware called "the
| metaverse". News flash: no one wants to wear VR goggles to spend
| any time in a digital heaven where the role of God is played by
| Mark Zuckerberg and you can do anything you can imagine,
| including "work" and "shop".
|
| Sounds like this guy was totally opposed to the company's new
| focus, to the point of describing it in derisive terms. Seems
| like letting him go was the best thing for everyone, and maybe it
| was judged that his team wouldn't be able to continue
| successfully without him.
| blitz_skull wrote:
| Just staring at facts on paper... It sounds like Facebook has
| no interest in cutting costs since they cut a team that reduced
| the cost of every single team they interacted with. By a large
| multiple of whatever it cost to have that team employed.
|
| Regardless of your take on the "Metaverse", it's clear that
| this was in fact, not the best thing for everyone.
| woah wrote:
| How much money did it save? How much was this in savings
| after paying their salaries? Article doesn't say. If they
| were breaking even, or barely "profitable", then maybe it
| wasn't worth the management overhead, especially with a team
| lead vehemently opposed to the company's focus.
| [deleted]
| cleandreams wrote:
| This is sad. I find probablistic programming languages very
| interesting. This probably means that many of the most useful
| ideas are disappeared. Does anyone know any relevant papers that
| describe what they did?
| troelsSteegin wrote:
| His post mentions "Bean Machine."
|
| https://ericlippert.com/2020/09/23/introducing-bean-machine/
|
| https://beanmachine.org/
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I wonder if this is why there's been a spate of open source
| announcements from Meta. Might just me being sensitive to it, but
| I can imagine worried team members wanting to give the world some
| of their work, and/or want to pick up where they left off in
| another company.
| Satam wrote:
| Author mentions that his team's work saved "millions" of dollars
| for Meta every year - let's assume that's $10 million. Meta's
| operating expenses are over $80 billion annually. That's barely
| one hundredth of a _percent_ in savings for Meta.
|
| I'm sure they were doing interesting work otherwise, but it make
| sense why the team would be considered for cuts if there weren't
| any breakthroughs on the horizon.
| bfeynman wrote:
| This news didn't surprise me at all. Academics and research
| scientists on teams like this are very far removed from driving
| revenue and understanding the value you provide. It's just as
| likely that the teams they saved costs for are also
| hemorrhaging anyway and being shut down or reduced.
| trenchgun wrote:
| Full quote:
|
| "The mission of the Probability division was to create small
| teams that applied the latest academic research to real-world
| at-scale problems, in order to improve other groups' decision-
| making and lower their costs. New sub-teams were constantly
| formed; if they didn't show results quickly then they were
| failed-fast; if they did show results then they were
| reorganized into whatever division they could most effectively
| lower costs.
|
| We were very successful at this. The PPL team in particular was
| at the point where we were regularly putting models into
| production that on net reduced costs by millions of dollars a
| year over the cost of the work. We were almost ready to be spun
| off.
|
| We foolishly thought that we would naturally be protected from
| any layoffs, being a team that reduced costs of any team we
| partnered with. In retrospect, that was a little naive. A team
| that reduces costs of other teams is not on anyone's critical
| path."
| sp332 wrote:
| If the team is costing less than $10 million/year, it still
| makes less sense to let them go.
| time_to_smile wrote:
| It's not hard for a team at Meta to easily cost more than $10
| million/year. Average TC for each IC could reasonably have
| been in the 500k/year area and that doesn't count other
| benefits/infra overhead. A few very senior people on the team
| could easily have pushed the average TC up quite a bit.
|
| So if the team was around 20 people that already doesn't make
| sense.
| function_seven wrote:
| This post notes that the savings were net of cost. Maybe
| Eric is wrong, but assuming his math checks out, cutting a
| team that delivers _net_ savings can't be justified on the
| basis of cost-cutting.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| It only makes sense if you can make it up in volume.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KodqIPMbyUg&t=53s
| abraae wrote:
| > a team that delivers net savings can't be justified on
| the basis of cost-cutting
|
| ..in theory not, but in practice cost-cutting is often
| less a scientific, data-based project and more a
| cataclysmic purgative process where factors such as speed
| of execution are important.
|
| e.g. Elon has certainly lost many, many great people and
| teams who were net positive for Twitter's bottom line in
| his recent purges. But he probably thinks there is huge
| value in acting quickly and putting the aggressive
| cutting behind him and inserting his "hardcore" team.
| There would be a real cost to the Twitter shareholders in
| doing a slow and scientific analysis of who to cut -
| there's a case to be made that a ruthless tearing off of
| the bandaid would more quickly lead to a profitable
| place, even if there is collateral damage on the way.
| runevault wrote:
| Except he specifically said millions of dollars a year
| "over the cost of the work". They were a net bonus on the
| balance sheet.
| progbits wrote:
| The article says their _net_ cost savings were $10M. So I
| would expect that accounts for the costs of the team
| (salary, and whatever cost they spent building their
| projects).
|
| Either way, not disputing the arguments in this comment
| chain.
| htrp wrote:
| The savings are already banked (in the code/infrastructure)
| so you save the headcount cost as well.
| trenchgun wrote:
| His other comment clarifies this: "The team was all
| mathematicians. We did the math. I helped one of our data
| scientists put a model into production that saved $15M a year
| from that model alone, and we had a dozen people like that. We
| were working on signal loss models that had potential to save
| billions. I genuinely do not understand the logic of cutting
| this team to save costs."
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33806727
| kyleyeats wrote:
| So which one was it? Was the team very important or is the work
| being thrown away?
| raydev wrote:
| Both.
| trenchgun wrote:
| Facebook has become a clown car company.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I wish Mr. Lippert and his team well.
|
| _> But after >26 years of thinking about programming languages
| for corporations, and the last three years of my work being
| thrown away, I need a good long corporate detox before I go
| looking again._
|
| OMG, can I relate to this.
|
| The chances are good, that, if he can support himself; even if
| not at oriental levels of luxury, he will not want to return.
|
| That has been my experience.
|
| Come on in, Eric, the water's fine...
| sefrost wrote:
| What is the water?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| The Write the Code You Want, Without Middle Managers and
| Clueless Coworkers Interfering Sea.
| rob74 wrote:
| > _Speaking of cutting costs, the company is still pouring
| multiple billions of dollars into vaporware called "the
| metaverse". News flash: no one wants to wear VR goggles to spend
| any time in a digital heaven where the role of God is played by
| Mark Zuckerberg and you can do anything you can imagine,
| including "work" and "shop"._
|
| You can somehow feel that he has been dying to say this for
| years, but couldn't while he was still working for Meta...
|
| But yeah, I can imagine how the decisions on layoffs usually go:
| "what are those guys doing? Probabilistic something or other?! No
| idea what that's good for! And wow, look how much they get paid!"
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > no one wants to wear VR goggles
|
| I would be curious how many people are willing to wear VR
| goggles for any amount of time. I spend easily 10-12 hours a
| day at my computer. I am absolutely someone who is happy
| working, socializing, playing, and learning all at the same
| desk. But I can't wear those goggles for even 2 hours. Are
| there people who can wear them for 12?
| luckylion wrote:
| I haven't used the new ones, but I have an Oculus Go. I think
| the most important part is fitting. I believe there are
| companies selling accessories to make it more comfortable to
| wear, and I'd totally invest in that if I planned to use it
| more, or in a different setting.
|
| I'm using it for porn (and it's amazing, VR porn is the most
| underrated thing imho, but maybe I'm just weird) and for
| movies (non-3d, having these slightly-3d-movies didn't really
| add to the experience for me). I'm someone who can't
| concentrate on movies on a normal screen, my attention
| wanders and I'll quit watching and do something else,
| continue later etc and it might take me three days to
| complete a single movie. Not so while using the Oculus Go,
| I'm cut off from the world around me, focused on the movie,
| and now I sometimes watch a movie in one sitting (though I do
| rarely watch movies these days, so idk how much this is
| worth).
|
| I don't know if I want to spend any time "socializing"
| through it, but when I was sick I've definitely used it for
| 6-7 hours on one day to watch multiple movies, and it was
| fine.
| bink wrote:
| Watching movies seems like a different application of the
| tech. Doesn't that just simulate a movie screen several
| feet in front of you? That's probably not quite as sickness
| inducing as moving around a full VR environment.
| luckylion wrote:
| Yes. I mean, if you want to, you can also have a
| simulated empty cinema around the screen.
|
| I've never felt sick while using it, but I've also only
| played very few games on it, and those weren't action
| packed with lots of moving about, but more simple and
| relaxed.
| rurp wrote:
| The fact that VR content is gated behind major companies
| concerned with brand safety is a major reason to be
| skeptical about current VR tech ever taking off. If it were
| more like the early internet where any passionate and
| reasonably technical person could make widely available
| apps and content, I think VR would be _much_ more
| interesting. Porn is one of the most obvious genres, but
| also just having a bunch of weird niche content and
| experimental games would be really cool.
|
| Living in a bland Facebook controlled world overseen by
| Zuckerberg the God is about as enticing as filing my taxes
| on a daily cadence.
| bbarnett wrote:
| _But I can 't wear those goggles for even 2 hours. Are there
| people who can wear them for 12?_
|
| As someone who has never seen or held a pair (I don't have a
| facebook account), what is the long term barrier?
|
| Weight? Size? Such as, if they were sunglass sized, would
| they be longer term wear?
|
| Or is it still the resolution/disconnected feeling/etc?
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Weight, they can make you sweaty, may feel uncomfortable in
| other ways, look dorky as hell. Probably do a bunch of bad
| eyestrain-related stuff that we haven't figured out yet (or
| some have but are keeping it quiet). _Serious_ motion-
| sickness issues for a fraction of users that 's too large
| to ignore, even with top-notch goggles.
|
| When they're in the same size/weight/appearance ballpark as
| sunglasses, is when AR/VR glasses will take off. It'll be
| the next "smartphone revolution", no question about it.
| We'll wonder how we ever put up with being as tied-down as
| we are at a normal office workstation. The smartphone put
| the Internet everywhere, rather than in one place, AR/VR
| will put your _computer_ everywhere. Until then... yeah, it
| 's niche tech.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I have a HTC vive original and I actually had a lot of fun
| with it, but I don't use it anymore because it takes up a
| lot of space and the experience is still kind of clunky/low
| res.
|
| For many people there is a physical discomfort side. From
| either the heavy device or motion sickness. I didn't have
| much issue with this other than playing one time for most
| of the day and the weight on my face was a bit much.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| For me personally, my eyes got very tired very fast, after
| an hour long session left me feeling as though I had been
| staring at a screen for 10 hours straight
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I use Ocullus quest 2 to play (and LOVE it!). Weight, head
| and neck strain / tightness are the first issue. Nausea is
| the follow up. Eye strain is the final. I never use it for
| more than 30min at the time.
|
| I cannot imagine spending ANY work time in VR at this point
| in technology cycle, once you add resolution, accuracy,
| etc. I do not understand what problem it's solving - if you
| want to visually interact remotely, turn on your camera. If
| you don't, just talk and screenshare. I do not understand
| what virtual reality will add to my interactions and
| productivity.
| jandrese wrote:
| So the plural of anecdote isn't data, but I have a Quest 2
| and the limiting factor on use for me is one of two things.
|
| 1. The battery runs out.
|
| 2. I get physically exhausted. Most of the VR stuff I do is
| fairly energetic so it's not the VR goggles that tire me
| out, it's the constant swinging of arms and
| jumping/crouching.
|
| I've never had an issue with motion sickness and since I'm
| doing it in my home any worries about how dorky they look
| are silly. Comfort is mostly fine, although you do have to
| wash off the foam bits that touch your face regularly or
| they'll start to smell like old gym socks. Fogging of the
| lenses is also an annoying and regular issue that I've
| never fully solved, mostly just getting used to everything
| being soft looking. The final minor issue is that the
| lenses can get warm (like hardworking cell phone level
| warm) so if your room is already hot they would probably
| get fairly uncomfortable.
|
| Thanks to the battery issue I've never used them for more
| than a couple of hours at a time however. I can't comment
| about the comfort after 12 hours. I imagine my arms would
| have fallen off long before I got to 12 hours of Dragon
| Fist, Ragnarock, or Beat Saber however.
|
| To stay article relevant I will comment about Horizon
| Worlds: My overall impression after an hour of trying it
| out just to see was "What did they spend the billions of
| dollars on?" It's so corporate and empty and I have no idea
| where all of the money went. It looks like any old VR Chat
| clone, there are a handful of minigames, chatrooms, and "VR
| Experiences" which are just short looped videos. It's not
| like SecondLife where you could maybe build your own thing
| or might stumble upon some crazy weird thing at any point.
| It's just minimal effort everywhere you look. To hear that
| it is such a money pit makes me wonder if it's some kind of
| weird money laundering thing or if the developers are just
| watching YouTube all day for years?
| Arrath wrote:
| As someone who has pretty heavily used a Rift 2 for 5+
| years now, primarily its ergonomics and comfort.
|
| More physical activities can result in the foam around the
| eye piece absorbing a goodly quantity of sweat (addressable
| e.g. with the plastic cover that comes with the Quest 2 or
| aftermarket alternatives) which just feels gross and can
| lead to more humidity being trapped within the headset,
| fogging the lenses, and so on.
|
| The weight is a bit awkward, and different straps can help
| distribute it better and stay comfortable for longer. The
| ear phones can be uncomfortable after a time as well,
| pressing down on the ears as they do. If they were a
| cupping style like high end headphones, that would help a
| lot.
|
| I do find that the tethered units like the Rift are more
| comfortable for longer than the self contained units like
| the Quest, since they offload processing, power, etc and
| the attendant weight, to the desktop machine.
|
| Eye strain does add up eventually, and newer headsets have
| better screens but I wonder if this is just a truly
| insurmountable problem of mounting screens mere inches from
| your eyes.
| wccrawford wrote:
| There's a little bit of heaviness if they headset isn't
| balanced well, but that's easily fixed.
|
| The more concerning thing is the motion sickness. Most
| people, at first, get nauseated after a short while, and if
| they don't stop using them for _hours_ at that point, it
| gets worse and worse each time they use them.
|
| However, if they stop and recover (at least a few hours, a
| day is better) when they first start to feel it, they'll
| gradually get more and more used to it.
|
| There's also the inability to properly see things around
| you, like your coffee or your mouse. AR is a good fix for
| that, though, and Meta's new Pro glasses specifically don't
| have full wrap-around so that you can still see around you
| somewhat. It ruins immersion in games, but they aren't
| meant for games.
|
| I'm a pretty big fan of VR from way back, and I've owned
| multiple different headsets now. I do think the "metaverse"
| is an eventuality, but it's not about meetings, it's about
| agency. Meta's current attempt at "the metaverse" is just a
| crappy attempt at doing better than Second Life, but
| without even the things that made Second Life as good as it
| was.
|
| The agency to create things yourself and sell to others,
| and the ability to buy licensed in-universe items is pretty
| much essential to a functional metaverse, IMO. Meta may
| intend to get there eventually, but trying to sell it as
| "the metaverse" before that point is pointless and harmful
| to their goals. It's going to take a long time to get
| there, and I'm still hoping that a grassroots movement
| makes it happen first instead of a big corporation. Ready
| Player One was all about that scenario and what it would
| mean. You have to look past the cloying nostalgia to see
| it, of course. ;)
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| Well, not that I'm in favor of the idea, but probably if
| you're used to wearing VR goggles since childhood (the same
| way we are with regular screens) spending 12 hours a day with
| them on may be just fine.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| When I am interacting with regular screens what my eyes see
| and what my proprioception and internal ear perceive are
| perfectly synchronous. However, the lag in VR is still
| human perceivable.
|
| It is not a 'getting used to' exposure problem it is still
| very much is a VR technology problem. We are just not quite
| there yet.
| mr_gibbins wrote:
| I can manage 15 minutes or so on my aging Oculus Quest but
| that's about it. There's a Netflix option on there, I can
| relax in a virtual cinema with surround sound and a screen
| sized big enough to feel like a cinema screen and I've not
| been able to watch anything because of the vertigo.
|
| I thought my kids would go crazy on it, perhaps I'm too old,
| out of touch etc. but they can do 15 mins max too. It's a
| novelty toy, quickly put away.
|
| If Google Glasses had really taken off and I could have AR,
| not VR - overlays on ordinary vision - I'd be there. Handy
| for work, could do virtual meetings, notifications, all
| sorts. But as with most things Google it went the way of the
| dodo and I haven't heard of any replacement poised to take
| the world by storm.
| dnissley wrote:
| > _You can somehow feel that he has been dying to say this for
| years, but couldn 't while he was still working for Meta..._
|
| It's a pretty common sentiment in my experience here, de
| rigueur even. Expressing it in the way he does here is
| definitely frowned upon though -- one of the most interesting
| cultural traits I've noticed that Meta has fostered is an
| awareness and avoidance of cynicism. When people comment
| internally and there is even a hint of cynicism in what they
| say, they are frequently called out on it. Never seen such a
| thing ever before in my life. For me it's refreshing, but I
| imagine for some, depending on the topic and how negatively
| they feel about it, it could lead them to spiral and exit.
| maxbond wrote:
| You say "cynicism", I say "acknowledging nudity".
| madrox wrote:
| We're talking about cynicism and not criticism, correct? In
| my experience, cynicism is unproductive at best and anti-
| productive at worst. Criticism, of course, is valuable and
| healthy.
|
| Cynicism is a good and healthy thing to share with colleagues
| over a beer, but when you're on the clock will kill morale.
| Arguably dumping loads of money on a vaporware moonshot is
| also a morale killer, but sniping at it in meetings helps no
| one.
| hobs wrote:
| Excessive cynicism in the face of actual positive change is
| bad, however when you have no power to change something,
| you resort to cynicism. If your employees feel no power to
| express themselves over your bad decisions, you've built a
| truly toxic system.
| eCa wrote:
| > fostered is an awareness and avoidance of cynicism
|
| There's a fine line between fostering avoidance of cynicism
| on one side, and fostering koolaiding and yes-manning on the
| other.
| devwastaken wrote:
| That's a form of thought policing. It's not cynical if it's a
| legitimate criticism. Ideas do not automatically deserve
| legitimacy, they must require reason first.
|
| The metaverse is not real, it's not going to happen. The
| numbers are not there. All of those users are in vrchat, and
| when Facebook buys it and turns it into a hell scape of a
| child playground the community will yet again go elsewhere.
| zwkrt wrote:
| Too much cyncism in any person or organization will lead to
| gridlock and/or burnout as new ideas are immediately scrapped
| and morale tanks. Just ask anyone who has worked for 10+
| years in government. However, for a private company that kind
| of critical thinking is often important to make sure that all
| the lemmings don't run off the cliff.
|
| It is interesting to me that cynicism is stifled at a
| cultural level at Meta. It is some kind of low-level cult
| like behavior, to stifle internal criticism. It must also
| breed a kind of in-group/out-group mentality, as I don't know
| a single person IRL who has a positive view of the company,
| its products, or the metaverse.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I find too much cynicism off-putting. I'm at a Big Tech
| adjacent (or not depending) company and one reason (of
| many) I don't consider Google as a potential employer is
| because everyone I've met there is deeply cynical about the
| company. I've gone places in my life I never expected I'd
| end up in, my own brain is wired to filter out cynicism. If
| I had to deal with a company culture deeply cynical about
| everything they work on, I'd either become irascible or
| horribly depressed.
|
| People are different. Good thing we tech folks are well-
| compensated and are in fairly high demand.
| leksak wrote:
| Too much cynisism certainly sounds bad, but cynisism in
| and of itself shouldn't necessarily be problematic.
| Eskewing it entirely to always opt for optimism is
| inherently dishonest and does not acknowledge that
| sometimes having a negative response is fair and
| justified. And not allowing that as part of company
| culture is stifling.
|
| Do you think people's cynisism about Google has made you
| miss out on a positive opportunity or can their
| discontent have signaled actual organizational issues
| that'd have affected you in negatively?
| maxbond wrote:
| I think across this thread we're conflating cynicism with
| skepticism. I am a utopian; I'm no believer in cynicism.
| It is unhelpful to shoot down everything or to refuse to
| even try, and a goal being unachievable doesn't
| necessarily means we won't accomplish valuable stuff in
| it's pursuit.
|
| But that doesn't mean we shouldn't examine and criticize
| ideas, that we shouldn't seek to improve upon them and -
| perhaps, if they are irreparable - abandon them for
| better ideas.
|
| Attempting to force the market into a box that is
| convenient for _you_ because it enhances your power and
| market position, because you want to be in control of a
| hardware platform to achieve parity with your competitors
| - and refusing to acknowledge it may not be what people
| actually want - _that_ is truly cynical.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Some of this is quibbling about definitions in my head at
| least. Fundamentally I like working in environments where
| folks are optimistic but realistic, keenly aware of how
| effortless failure is. Discussing both failure and
| success should be allowed and encouraged, but constantly
| looking at the negative or opining about how an
| individual can't change anything in the organization
| doesn't feel healthy to me. Most Googlers I've talked to
| view the company as a large, corporate politics chess
| game where engineers are the pawns.
|
| > Do you think people's cynisism about Google has made
| you miss out on a positive opportunity or can their
| discontent have signaled actual organizational issues
| that'd have affected you in negatively?
|
| This is a really good question and I don't have a good
| answer for it. At this point my sample size is high
| enough that I'm inclined to think it's Google but I also
| realize my sample set has lots of correlating factors
| (they're more junior than me, they work in different
| areas than I would, etc, etc) that could lead to their
| cynicism that might not affect me.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| I felt this way about the entire United States when I moved
| here from Europe. The standard stance in the UK is cynical,
| dry, and too-cool-for-school. Try-hards are despised. The US
| was different and very refreshing. Enthusiasm and optimism
| can be expressed without embarrassment, and having a too-
| frequently-cynical stance is looked down on.
|
| I felt a step change again moving from academia to industry,
| but perhaps it goes a step too far. Sometimes I feel like
| thoughtful analysis is suppressed in favor of active thrash,
| because the former smells like skepticism and the latter
| optimism.
| [deleted]
| ouid wrote:
| >for me it's refreshing.
|
| blink twice if you need help?
| simplotek wrote:
| > When people comment internally and there is even a hint of
| cynicism in what they say, they are frequently called out on
| it.
|
| Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like whenever people
| presented valid criticism, the standard approach to silence
| it would be to criticise the tone with a holier-than-thou
| attitude. Sounds like a cynical ploy to shield yourself from
| criticism.
| jordwest wrote:
| I've experienced this in a similar workplace before and did
| lead me to spiral and exit, to me it was absolutely
| exhausting keeping such a ruse up. There was something about
| it that felt so inauthentic, a bit toxic positivity, a bit
| hide-the-pain-harold.
|
| It's like the workplace version of Instagram itself, where
| everybody shows their best side, is mildly ashamed of feeling
| anything but positive because of the collective emphasis on
| "good vibes only" and keeps any concerns, cynicism or
| suggestions that we're going in the wrong direction under
| wraps.
|
| I think it's ultimately unhealthy (both individually,
| psychologically and to the company) and leads to the same
| problems you see in autocratic nations - the leaders only see
| everything going swimmingly.
| chubot wrote:
| So Facebook doesn't have something like memegen?
|
| I worked at Google when it was created and "went viral".
| Before memegen there was a strain of what I would call
| inauthentic positivity
|
| I think memegen made it a lot more acceptable to be
| cynical, which was probably good, because the company was
| definitely drinking a lot of its own Kool-aid
| dnissley wrote:
| Oh we definitely do -- the shitposting workplace group
| serves this purpose. Also the private nonmanagers group.
| vlunkr wrote:
| My last two jobs have had this lack of cynicism, but I
| would describe only one of them as toxic. We were going
| straight to the top and anyone who left was a traitor. The
| other simply considered the products to be incredibly
| important and life-changing.
|
| I can live with keeping the cynicism to myself as long as
| the rest of the culture is ok.
| ericlippert wrote:
| I see your point and don't mean to be argumentative, but a
| couple small corrections.
|
| First, the pivot to "meta" was just over a year ago, so it
| hasn't been quite years.
|
| Second, I haven't been shy about sharing my opinion internally,
| though I haven't been broadcasting it either. The first thing I
| said in our team group chat when we'd heard this announcement
| was (context, I am much older than most people on the team)
| "I'm old enough to have read Snow Crash the week it came out
| and IT WAS A DYSTOPIA, why are we building it?"
|
| Third, this opinion is indeed extremely common internally.
|
| Fourth, I genuinely have no idea how this decision was made; it
| was certainly not on the basis of net cost savings. We did the
| math.
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| 3 years of work being thrown away is not a big deal. Imagine a
| retail employee complaining about how nobody cares what they did
| the past 3 years. I don't see a difference.
| fred_is_fred wrote:
| Presumably the retail employee does not see this as a passion
| or life calling and rather only a paycheck. From the look of
| his writing he was pretty passionate about this.
| cpsns wrote:
| Nah, this is a huge deal for some of us. Many of us put in
| years of work for something to be thrown away without a second
| thought, all of our time and effort for nothing.
|
| I am someone who wants to build long lasting, useful systems.
| When my last employer was acquired and killed it really, really
| upset me to see all my hard work and my coworkers hard work
| destroyed.
|
| I'd go so far as to say it seriously affected my view of the
| industry in a negative way and permanently hurt my career
| satisfaction.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| Of course it's a huge deal. What they're saying is that it
| happens. Constantly.
|
| Sometimes I even ponder if my decades-worth experience is not
| basically because I'm writing the same program over and over
| again, just for different companies...
| cpsns wrote:
| > What they're saying is that it happens. Constantly.
|
| And I'm personally not okay with that when it comes to the
| work I do.
|
| It was a personally very eye opening experience to drive
| around with a guy who built homes. He'd point out every
| house he worked on, even ones 30 years ago and you could
| tell he was really, truly proud of his work and showing it
| off.
|
| I realised if someone asked to see my past work it simply
| doesn't exist in any meaningful capacity. I take pride in
| my work, but it doesn't exist long term like his does. I
| want that same kind of satisfaction he had, but there's no
| way for me to get it. His work lasts a lifetime and makes
| the lives of people better, mine lasts a few years at best
| and often doesn't.
| noizejoy wrote:
| > 3 years of work being thrown away is not a big deal. Imagine
| a retail employee complaining about how nobody cares what they
| did the past 3 years. I don't see a difference.
|
| There's a big difference between project work and operational
| work, including what kind of individuals it attracts and
| therefore what many of those individuals gain work satisfaction
| from.
| egypturnash wrote:
| The retail work was not huge and important but it was
| definitely _work_ - people came into the shop looking for a
| thing the shop might be able to provide, and many of them left
| with the thing they wanted.
|
| You would not have anything to show for three years of that
| beyond a series of paystubs, but every day you would have seen
| the fruits of your work.
|
| Laboring for years on something that ends up trashed and under
| corporate NDAs, with nothing to show beyond a series of
| paystubs, is different from that. Most of my friends who work
| for corporations have felt this at least once in their career,
| to be honest. It generally pays better than the retail job, at
| least.
| raydev wrote:
| > Laboring for years on something that ends up trashed and
| under corporate NDAs, with nothing to show beyond a series of
| paystubs, is different from that
|
| I'm struggling to relate to this. Me and the rest of my team
| were literally laid off just a few weeks ago. What I'm
| hearing from the inside is that half of our work is now in
| maintenance mode (it's kinda necessary for KTL) and the Big
| Project(tm) we were working on is fully abandoned.
|
| I guess I'm sad the Big Project(tm) will no longer exist, but
| I learned dozens of lessons while working on it, and I'm more
| confident and a better engineer because of those lessons and
| effort. And I get to add some nice things to my resume.
|
| It doesn't truly feel like a loss. Hundreds of other
| companies will do similar things and I will try to join them
| or I'll be interested in some other field in a few years.
|
| But I'm already familiar with changing jobs every few years
| so perhaps that's why I find it harder to relate.
| TristanBall wrote:
| If your work is rote crud apps the sure, I can see that. But if
| your work has been the development, deployment and advocacy of
| your own ideas and research... thats very different to me,
| because the level of personal ownership is greater.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Seriously, this headline gave me a chuckle. Like I'm sure it
| feels bad or whatever but it's weird when anything I build for
| pay _isn 't_ dead and gone within three years, either replaced
| or simply abandoned for various reasons. My first thought was
| that "first time?" hanging-scene meme.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| What costs were being saved? I am assuming hardware/cloud type
| costs? Or was it making people more efficient, working on the
| right stuff instead of the wrong stuff?
|
| It sounds like they were working with a gun to their head, with
| the short lived projects run in a survival of the fittest short-
| lifecycle way. Kind of sounds exhausting!
|
| I had a funny thought: The best team to be on during cutbacks is
| the probabilistic programming team that optimizes who to cut.
| tristor wrote:
| I feel this so much. To my deep dismay the work I'm least proud
| of in my career somehow endures in production and the things I'm
| most proud of building were acquired and chopped into parts or
| killed off. As a PM luckily everything I've launched still
| exists, so far.
| KKKKkkkk1 wrote:
| Eric Lippert was my hero back when his blog was hosted on MSDN.
| Sad to see him go into retirement when he's at his prime. Hope he
| finds some new exciting project.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Given how many greatly appreciated his blog and have been upset
| at the last few years of Facebook-encouraged radio silence
| (including myself, Eric Lippert has been a blogger I've looked
| forward to posts from), even if he were to just fall into the
| exciting "old" project of blogging regularly again (as his post
| teases at the bottom), I think that would be a great use of
| "his prime" and I wouldn't exactly call that a retirement
| either. Our industry tends to forget, overlook, and/or look
| down on pedagogy (teaching), but I think it is worthy enough to
| celebrate a great teacher returning to teaching after lost
| years away.
|
| I hope, if Eric does need to return to laboring for someone
| else's company that he does so without restriction to his
| teaching efforts, as he has seemed to always enjoy that. But I
| think more fervently I hope that Eric finds out what _he_ wants
| to do, and if maybe that is teaching that is high calling,
| often underserved in this industry, and that he can find a
| fulfilling way to do that on his own terms as his own vocation.
| That may _look_ like a retirement to a lot of us on HN, but I
| think there are few things more worthy to be doing with your
| time than a "hobby" that has clearly already educated a lot of
| people in threads around here.
| Arainach wrote:
| In contrast, I'm sad to see so many people spend their prime
| sitting at a desk 8+ hours a day, ever day.
|
| Getting old is rough. At no point in your life will it be
| easier to scuba dive, take nature photography, travel, or
| whatever your passion is. Eric's done this for 25+ years and
| presumably has a good amount of savings; why not take advantage
| of other parts of life?
| runevault wrote:
| I didn't take it as retirement, I took it as a break to figure
| out what he wants to do next and relax. Maybe he just calls it
| a career, maybe not.
| defen wrote:
| > Then said Jesus unto him, "Put up again thy sword into his
| place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the
| sword".
|
| I'm a big fan of Eric Lippert's work, but this blog post comes
| across as whiny and evinces a completely unwarranted sense of
| entitlement. This is a person who _voluntarily chose_ to get paid
| (I can only assume) a very large amount of money to work on
| something that he found to be exciting and fulfilling. The only
| catch: it all belonged to Mark Zuckerberg.
|
| Why does Mark Zuckerberg owe him an explanation for why his
| services are no longer needed? Why does he think that the
| decision process should be visible and rational (cost vs benefit)
| to him? It suggests that he has a fundamental misunderstanding of
| the world. Instead of being "vexed" that _he_ was fired instead
| of the people building toys for Mark Zuckerberg, perhaps he
| should be thankful for the two years he spent working on the PPL
| team.
| aerovistae wrote:
| This comment conveys to me Asperger's levels of superrational
| thinking and lack of empathy. "How could someone be resentful
| at losing their job to a nonsensical decision making process?
| How could someone possibly be frustrated to be shown zero
| gratitude for their very profitable work for someone else? I
| simply don't understand, on paper it is the logical outcome."
| Okay spock.
| defen wrote:
| He can feel however he likes; nothing compelled him to post
| it publicly for all the world to read and comment.
|
| > How could someone be resentful at losing their job to a
| nonsensical decision making process? How could someone
| possibly be frustrated to be shown zero gratitude for their
| very profitable work for someone else?
|
| He chose to work for Mark Zuckerberg. He wishes he could
| _continue working_ for Mark Zuckerberg, in order to _make
| Mark Zuckerberg richer_. Perhaps you can understand why I don
| 't have a lot of empathy.
| jbullock35 wrote:
| > He wishes he could continue working for Mark Zuckerberg,
| in order to make Mark Zuckerberg richer.
|
| He never said that this is why he wants to continue working
| at Meta. People do have other reasons for wanting to work
| there.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| I think the distinction is between 'feels bad' and 'makes
| this post'. I totally get why someone would feel bad about
| this, even despite the upfront agreement and the paycheck. I
| don't really get the post, especially if this can impact
| future career prospects (I've seen people judged for less).
| I've had negative emotional reactions to things that were
| entirely my fault and acted irrationally to them, but only
| privately. I think the distinction here is not in his
| negative feelings, those are easily to empathize with, but in
| the post itself and how it publicly portrays those feelings.
| huzaif wrote:
| I am guilty of that as well.
|
| I somehow value my time more than the money. I think that I
| have some kind of stake/interest in things I dedicated my time
| to.
|
| Though I am always thankful (as Eric is in this post) for the
| people and the income. I can't help but feel regretful as the
| product of my time and dedication is discarded.
| elmomle wrote:
| I don't think that top-tier academic talent thinks like that.
| Yes, there is usually a conscious element of "I am grateful to
| the people who have supported my work", but the obsequious
| mentality you're describing is one that I've never, ever
| observed in high-performing academic leaders working in
| corporations. Please provide counter-examples if any come to
| mind!
| TomSwirly wrote:
| > his blog post comes across as whiny and evinces a completely
| unwarranted sense of entitlement.
|
| You see, most of us actually care about our work and hate to
| see it thrown away.
|
| > Instead of being "vexed" that he was fired instead of the
| people building toys for Mark Zuckerberg, perhaps he should be
| thankful for the two years he spent working on the PPL team.
|
| Again, you don't understand how normal people work.
|
| Normal people would be sad to see work they cared about
| passionately and had sunk thousands of hours into being thrown
| away, particularly when it's being done for no good reason.
|
| ---
|
| Your post comes off as callous. You claim to be a "big fan" of
| this guy's work, and yet you mock him repeatedly for caring
| when that very same work is thrown into the garbage.
|
| I suggest cultivating compassion for others, particularly
| people you are big fans of.
| atomicnumber3 wrote:
| Have you ever been laid off?
|
| Me neither until about a month ago. Let me tell you - it's
| awful. I've watched myself and many coworkers go through the
| process of emotionally accepting it.
|
| Some people want to know what algorithm or decision-making
| picked them for the chopping block. Some out of a desire to
| know that it wasn't performance-related, others to know the
| mechanics because maybe it feels like you'll be able to avoid
| it next time, or at least see it coming.
|
| Some are just mad. Mad that their hard work went unappreciated,
| mad that their lives have been upended at the whims of a
| handful of rich people (who take _full_ responsibility of
| course), mad that they have to change life plans and go through
| our industry 's stupid interviewing process.
|
| Some are very sad - it's deflating and depressing to be plugged
| into the fast-paced, high pressure environments these places
| cultivate and then just be told the next day you'll be doing...
| nothing. (Not here, anyway!) And pulling yourself out of the
| rut means going over the bed of nails that is job-seeking.
|
| I was personally mostly in the first group. I think I'm mostly
| accepted it now. Except for while I'm in the shower - then I'm
| just mad at it all.
|
| Anyway, my point is, everyone deserves the space to emotionally
| process this stuff, and I don't think you should look down on
| his own version of the process.
| defen wrote:
| No, because I've deliberately chosen to accept a lower salary
| (by working for myself) in exchange for greater personal
| autonomy, owning my work output, and the freedom to talk
| about whatever I want.
| lmm wrote:
| I've been laid off with a week's notice. 4 years of my work
| very likely thrown away (including the part that I'd always
| been told would be open-sourced Real Soon Now). Pretty sure I
| got less notice and less severance than this guy. I agree
| with GP that complaining about it publicly feels whiny and
| entitled.
| bumby wrote:
| > _Why does he think that the decision process should be
| visible and rational (cost vs benefit) to him?_
|
| Good leaders spell out the _why_. For one, it's just decency.
| Secondly, if you care even a little about a subordinate, you
| want them to succeed after leaving. This feedback helps them
| understand any missteps they can avoid later. Thirdly, removing
| uncertainty reduces stress. It reminds me of the study about
| mice and electric shocks. The mice who were randomly shocked
| with no rhyme or reason became helpless because of the
| uncertainty in their life.
|
| Nobody is entitled to good leadership, but most can understand
| why it's necessary.
| stuff4ben wrote:
| He's not wrong about Meta's VR foray. VR as a technology is cool
| and revolutionary, Zuck's vision for it in our daily lives is
| not.
| ska wrote:
| > VR as a technology is cool and revolutionary
|
| That's a funny way of saying decades old at this point and
| still not ready for prime time.
| apohn wrote:
| I work in the field of Data Science and one upsetting reality has
| started to sink into my mind over the last year.
|
| In a business there is top line and bottom line. There are a lot
| Statistics/ML/Data Science jobs that are about moving that bottom
| line. You build something to optimize something to reduce costs.
|
| The value provided by the bottom line people is less visible than
| the value of top line people. The easiest way to move the move
| the bottom line is by just getting rid of people. So when the axe
| falls the bottom line people get cut and it's hard to understand
| why.
|
| It's the same thing as people say about fires. When you put out a
| fire you are a hero. When you prevent the fire in the first
| place, everybody thinks it's business as usual and nobody
| understands why you are needed.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| A friend had a job where a team there just let things fail
| rather than prevent fires. Lots of raises and praise for
| literally not doing their jobs.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| It's tricky, because there's genuine uncertainty about whether
| you have prevented a fire, or just wasted some time and maybe
| added some overhead. Even people who understand a system deeply
| can have reasonable disagreements about whether a preventative
| measure is worthwhile. Executives whose only interaction with
| the system is feeding it money have almost no chance of
| figuring it out in the face of any amount of conflicting info.
| And of course a mixture of natural human optimism, aka blithe
| disregard of danger, and having their salary depend on
| believing there are easy things to cut, makes it quite
| difficult for them to believe in any particular instance of a
| fire prevented.
|
| I hope it's clear that I don't mean to excuse them for giving
| up. It's hugely destructive both for decision makers and
| everyone around them. I just want to show that the problem is
| substantially harder than "just reward preventing fires
| already".
| a4isms wrote:
| > It's the same thing as people say about fires. When you put
| out a fire you are a hero. When you prevent the fire in the
| first place, everybody thinks it's business as usual and nobody
| understands why you are needed.
|
| I got a dose of very cold water about this thirty years ago
| when I was building payware that improved developer
| productivity. I gave a presentation about its ROI, and
| afterwards, a developer walked up to me and gave me some
| feedback that none of the business-types had articulated:
|
| _Products are either vitamins or painkillers. People buy
| painkillers, because they 're in pain. People postpone
| vitamins, because nothing is wrong and the benefits are always
| "later."_
|
| I didn't 100% change what I chose to build over the years, but
| from that time to today, I have worked on always spinning what
| I sell as an antidote to a customer's pain point, rather than
| as an investment they make to pay off eventually.
|
| p.s. I don't know where that dev got the "vitamin/painkiller"
| metaphor, but it's sticky!
| [deleted]
| astrange wrote:
| What actually happens with vitamins is people love taking
| them (because they're colorful and some of them are food
| preservatives) but there's like no evidence they have health
| benefits.
| mannykannot wrote:
| ...unless you actually have a deficiency.
| TomSwirly wrote:
| The people in the United States who can afford to buy and
| consume vitamins are almost certainly not people with a
| deficiency.
| mannykannot wrote:
| I happen to be one who does, and no, it's not a
| consequence of a bad diet or unhealthy lifestyle.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| Most people in the US are vitamin D deficient, it's very
| cheap, yet it's rare for people to take supplements.
| layer8 wrote:
| Technically though, vitamin D is not a vitamin. ;)
| astrange wrote:
| Yes, D+K is the best one to take. D only can lead to
| heart issues (atherosclerosis), and multivitamins don't
| really have enough to help here.
|
| It doesn't replace getting real sunlight though. Or if
| you're an Inuit, eating polar bear livers.
| dathinab wrote:
| Ironically this quote also show how broken the US is: It's
| normal to take pain killers.
|
| It should not be.
|
| It should be a last resort.
|
| You should take what fixes the problem and give your body
| time to heal not take pain killers and pretend nothing is
| wrong.
|
| Pain killers are addicting, can have an increasingly reduced
| effect, can have a bunch of side effects and can make the end
| result much worse by not healing wounds (metaphorically) when
| they are still easy to heal(1).
|
| (1): Through sometimes they can also help you healing by
| preventing you from doing pain-caused bad actions, like
| setting down your food in a bad angle.
|
| EDIT: Just to be clear I mean pain killers for a "normal
| live" situation, not in context of you lying in a hospital
| bed or having extrema healthy issue which can't be fixed/heal
| anytime shortly.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _Ironically this quote also show how broken the US is: It
| 's normal to take pain killers._
|
| I've heard this metaphor before, by a VC, and it was
| medicine vs vitamins.
| treeman79 wrote:
| A real fun one is rebound headaches. Spent a few months
| with horrifically painful headaches. Turned out it mostly
| from painkillers. More I took. Worse headaches Got.
|
| My other less painful headaches that started the cycle were
| an actual brain issue. Just took a few years to get correct
| diagnosis.
|
| Eventually had a cycle of one round of pain killers every
| other day. Cycling through To a different kind each time.
| This mostly worked until I got excess brain fluid drained
| off. Which actually solved issue.
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| It's a trope with some truth to it, but it runs out of steam
| fairly quickly. Was original facebook a painkiller?
| Instagram? $1000 iPhone? Liver King?
|
| I find it's a useful framework for selling b2b. Even then,
| desire can win over pain many times.
|
| Fear and greed are the real big sellers in b2b anyway.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > Was original facebook a painkiller? Instagram?
|
| I would say that it was closer to a tasty pizza.
|
| It was definitely not fitting either "vitamin" (worth
| investing for future payoff) or painkiller (solving
| immediate and urgent need[1])
|
| [1] I guess that hiding/temporary fix is not intended to be
| part of this allegory
| astrange wrote:
| Lots of people run businesses out of their Instagram
| accounts. Might not be what it was for, but those
| followers can be valuable.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| At my university, Facebook was the painkiller for
| involuntary celibacy ;)
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| The original facebook was a painkiller the same way the
| Oxycodone you crush up on a table and insuffulate is a
| painkiller. The metaphor works amusingly well, actually.
| beambot wrote:
| Youthful hormones and social belonging are pains too...
| Consumer pains are often more abstract.
| mjevans wrote:
| iPhone was / is a 'status symbol' and 'fashion accessory',
| which happened to be way better than the clunky, expensive,
| and poor UI mobile phones which came before, (aside from
| Blackberry, which was a corp status symbol, work / gov
| focused, not average consumer.)
| brutus1213 wrote:
| I understand the top-line bottom-line divide, but I am not
| fully convinced if the top-line projects are any safer.
| Wouldn't another reasonable business strategy be to get rid of
| all new projects, and only focus on operations-as-is during
| times of economic uncertainty?
| nemo44x wrote:
| That would be an extreme action. You do still need to be
| working with the future in mind. Anything that looks
| promising to revenue growth in the nearish future should
| probably continue to be invested in. You may ask those teams
| to become more scrappy and figure out how to achieve their
| goals with minimal new investment, especially if the new
| revenue streams are still a few quarters from coming online.
| jldugger wrote:
| > Wouldn't another reasonable business strategy be to get rid
| of all new projects
|
| Only if you want to close the company in ten years
| pixl97 wrote:
| That depends if you're about to get ate by your competitions
| new product
| angry_octet wrote:
| That's exactly what weak management does. Family management
| is especially prone to this IME. Cut new investment, cut cost
| of inputs, labour, quality control.
|
| That works as long as you have weak competitors (or a moat)
| and nothing terrible happens, like high defects. Essentially
| you're coasting on prior investment. But as soon as something
| changes in the market you're falling behind.
|
| What I've often observed is that new low cost competitors
| introduce features which are often reserved for high end
| devices/products due to market segmentation. The dominant
| player refuses to adapt and hence they lose all their low end
| market share, the volume of which is necessary to make the
| whole thing work. Meanwhile new customers start with the lost
| cost ecosystem.
|
| I've seen this happen with e.g. Agilent, or SaaS companies,
| who charge 10x for something that costs little, like SaML/AD
| auth.
|
| Imagine if NVIDIA had charged for CUDA or considered it a
| distraction from selling graphics cards. They wouldn't own
| the HPC/ML space if they had done that.
| draw_down wrote:
| nightski wrote:
| I think this is an insightful assessment. Not everyone in a
| company can be top line. But I also think there's a lot more
| opportunity in using statistics/ml/data science in the top line
| than most companies practice.
| apohn wrote:
| >But I also think there's a lot more opportunity in using
| statistics/ml/data science in the top line than most
| companies practice.
|
| I consider myself a fairly honest Data Scientist, in the
| sense that I like it when I can map what I'm doing to the
| value it delivers. I know some other great people I've worked
| with who are like this as well.
|
| This is anecdotal, but all of us have hated working with many
| top line people because there's some really fuzzy mapping
| from goal to value (since value is realized in the long
| term), and some of the people are champion bullshitters. I
| don't need to explain sales people. But marketing, corporate
| strategy, and even upper product management - they drove us
| crazy because their standard of being data driven was
| absolutely not consistent with how we thought about things at
| all. All of it was because the mapping from project to
| revenue was over years, not quarters. And it was all
| projections.
|
| Compare this to bottom line people, where the mapping from
| project to cost savings is on a shorter time frame. The types
| of personalities this attracts is different.
|
| Maybe the growth hacking stuff at software companies is
| different and you can focus on revenue growth and still
| connect what you are doing to that. I've never worked in that
| role so I don't know.
| greesil wrote:
| But that would lead to accountability...
| kneebonian wrote:
| This is the real problem. Visibility is to be abhorred at
| the top levels because viability brings accountability. How
| many Dilbert comics are there out there with the punchline
| being "I don't care what the real numbers are these are
| what I want the numbers to be" from the PHB
|
| There is a large swathe of middle and upper management that
| gets by due to continually making sure their actual impact
| is never measured, and they are only a "force multiplier."
| not that you should do away with middle management, but
| there are many in middle management who could be done away
| with, with very marginal loss.
| angry_octet wrote:
| OMG the 'Technology Foresight' group, the 'Process
| Improved Team'. Cross functional synergy!
|
| We all know what the problems are and where investment is
| needed, but management pretends that they don't know so
| they can have An Initiative to discover it, but not
| really address it (because e.g. the problem is one they
| caused with previous poor management).
| higeorge13 wrote:
| Yeah that's especially unfortunately true for data science and
| data engineering teams in companies where ml or data are not
| the core business but nice-to-have. They are usually the first
| ones from engineering being axed in times of lay offs.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Even for companies that have ML and/or Data in the core
| business. I think few would argue Meta in this specific
| layoff example doesn't have data as a core business.
|
| (And those few are probably the ones drinking the "metaverse
| Kool-Aid" and thinking the pivot away from data siloes is
| already complete to some sort of VR scape where data somehow
| doesn't matter or doesn't exist, that Meta still hasn't
| actually convinced consumers to buy or figured out how to
| build. They finally figured out "legs", pivot complete I
| guess?).
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Yeah I've worked in infrastructure through most of my career
| wherever such a distinction is available (or when it opens up),
| and this is a common complaint. Product folks get the most
| visibility and get kudos and parties for product launches.
| Meanwhile, the deployment infrastructure staying up is just
| expected, even though the engineers responsible for it are
| working hard to keep it up. It affects team morale
| (infrastructure teams are unrecognized for their hard work) and
| also has material affects on promotions and compensation as
| it's harder to justify business impact on these teams. I know
| folks that left infrastructure teams because of this dynamic.
| treeman79 wrote:
| Hired into a company. First day on job I find that the entire
| infrastructure team had quit. It was in a failing state.
|
| told them flat out that they are most likely going out of
| business, but I'll get it a try.
|
| Couple of times owner tried to Ask me when feature X would be
| delivered. Just told them no. Managers were wise enough to
| understand they were one pissed tech guy from failure.
|
| 3 years of endless late nights to get company back to a good
| spot with a rebuilt time, new infrastructure. Proper
| documentation, the works.
|
| Finally left after being passed over for promotion to a guy
| that did nothing, but promised the world. (He never
| delivered)
|
| Took me a couple years to recover from that job.
|
| I don't work late nights anymore. If company doesn't care to
| invest in infra, I look elsewhere.
| dh2022 wrote:
| Cutting costs but bringing no revenue shows as Cost Center on
| any financial report. Revenue though shows up as Revenue
| center. Thus this decisions which sometimes are illogical. Sad
| but true :)
| abakker wrote:
| Cutting costs is always a marginal thing, because businesses
| tend to value growth. Oversimplification: If you have a 50%
| margin business, the value of one more dollar of revenue is
| $.50. If you cut costs and change the margin to 55%, then
| you've added only $.05 of revenue to that additional dollar.
|
| Now, a sane person will look at the improvements to margin
| across the whole business and still want to make those
| improvements because in aggregate, they add up, BUT, you cannot
| improve margin forever as a strategy. Eventually, hard limits
| come up and the incremental gains shrink and shrink. At that
| point, growth dominates.
|
| Most mature businesses need revenue growth much more than they
| need marginal internal gains, especially because as businesses
| get bigger, marginal gains tend to apply to more limited
| segments of the business. E.g. improving one product is
| marginal and applies to only the sales associated with that
| product.
|
| I think the claim that data science is about moving the bottom
| line is right, but I think the other way of thinking about this
| is that Project/Consulting is probably a more relevant way for
| companies to buy these skills than Salary. Many companies can
| see the value in an incremental move in the bottom line, but
| most companies don't have a sufficiently large problem space to
| worry about paying a continuous cost to focus on this.
|
| I've seen a lot of big companies say that they need these
| skills, but also believe they can't attract talent because they
| wouldn't be able to keep a data scientist busy.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > Eventually, hard limits come up and the incremental gains
| shrink and shrink. At that point, growth dominates.
|
| The trick is understanding where the hard limits are. I've
| noticed that upper leadership tends to be pessimistic about
| these hard limits (they come quickly) and engineers on these
| teams tend to be optimistic (there's a lot of fat/cost to cut
| so the hard limits are quite far down.) Now naturally, the
| engineers on these teams have a vested interest in being
| optimistic, as their team charter is based around their work.
| But I've seen this conflict play out in many organizational
| situations and I'm not sure this interplay between upper
| leadership and engineering about these margins is
| illuminating for the business.
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| And if you cut costs in a (prospective or current) operating
| area from 120% of revenue to 90% of revenue, you've opened up
| an entire new operating area to profitably grow in.
|
| Developing the technology to do a thing profitably that
| previously could not be done profitably is the stuff unicorns
| are made of.
| abakker wrote:
| Absolutely! I hope my reply didn't imply that I thought
| there was no value in doing things more efficiently. There
| clearly is, and as consumers we love marginal gains in
| product quality, efficiency, and price.
|
| I'll nitpick a bit to ask, though, how many times has a new
| entrant to a market gotten a process/business/tool/etc from
| 120% operating to 90% through marginal gains? I'd wager
| almost never. Process improvement can be marginal or
| stepwise/punctuated. I think most unicorns create
| punctuated change in ossified industries, but, I don't
| think any big companies are likely to hire a data scientist
| and through years of grinding through the margins achieve
| that 30% improvement.
|
| put differently, the decision to focus on revenue vs profit
| is a decision that typically does not include the NPV of
| R&D investments. those are uncertain and have some
| probabilistic value, but not so much in accounting terms.
| a4isms wrote:
| I've been a part of this argument before. I have another,
| additional perspective on why growth is more important than
| cost-cutting in many cases. If there are costs to be cut, you
| can cut them today, you can cut them tomorrow, they're right
| there and eventually, you can hire someone/buy something to
| cut those costs.
|
| But growth is a tricky thing. If you're in a land grab market
| and you cut your costs at the expense of growth, you may find
| that you lost your chance to grow, because the market is now
| dominated by other people.
|
| For people with this mentality, they expect in the long term
| to cut costs, but only after growth has slowed for reasons
| out of their control, e.g. the makret is stabilizing and has
| already chosen the #1 big gorilla, the #2 little gorilla, and
| numbers #3 though #100 small monkeys picking up scraps.
| serverholic wrote:
| This is one of the reasons why I think making the workplace
| Democratic is a good idea. The workers have a better idea of
| what is important than the management.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Incorporate as a worker cooperative and not a corporation
| beholden to shareholders.
| kenjackson wrote:
| A very simple question that I've had to ask is "what likely
| happens if we cut this group?" then "what's the 'likely' worst
| case if we cut this group?"
|
| That problem with Eric's group and most Data Science teams is
| that the company continues to move along. There is some long-
| term cost, but there are likely teams where there are severe
| short-term ramifications if they are cut. E.g., imagine if
| Windows cut their servicing team (snarkiness aside).
| angry_octet wrote:
| It's a failure of the data science team management that they
| didn't make themselves a front line capability. It is easy
| for OR (Operations Research) to explain their business value,
| any DS team that only stays at the tail end of building
| capability is liable to be cut (or under invested).
|
| For DS it might mean being more on the market research /
| customer requirements / subscriber churn side, instead of
| being on the back end of services improvement / risk
| reduction. Be the thing that customers are asking about, that
| brings new customers.
| [deleted]
| bravetraveler wrote:
| This is a running joke for every systems
| administration/operations job I've had
|
| A common theme for commiserating, the only investment we get
| are complaints
|
| Make it work again with what you had or we have problems, must
| avoid OpEx at any cost
| kikokikokiko wrote:
| "Speaking of cutting costs, the company is still pouring multiple
| billions of dollars into vaporware called "the metaverse". News
| flash: no one wants to wear VR goggles to spend any time in a
| digital heaven where the role of God is played by Mark Zuckerberg
| and you can do anything you can imagine, including "work" and
| "shop"."
|
| This is so true. Facebook must die.
| echelon wrote:
| I'm not a fan of Meta, but they're doing the cutting edge
| research in VR/AR that nobody else is [1].
|
| Hardware, algorithms, attention to details like blend key-based
| lip syncing, markerless tracking algorithms, low latency
| posture correction, mocap compression and keyframing, fresnel
| optics, thin layer physics...
|
| They're going to _own_ this space for decades to come, and
| everyone will license from them.
|
| It may seem impractical, but five years ago so did AI/ML. Meta
| is tackling all of the constituent pieces before they draw them
| together.
|
| [1] Apple may be a major player in this space, but their
| rumored efforts are still behind closed doors. Meta understands
| that Apple and Google won the smartphone era of tech, which is
| why they want to control their hardware destiny in AR/VR. Valve
| simply isn't investing as much, and they'll fall behind.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| > Hardware, algorithms, attention to details like blend key-
| based lip syncing, markerless tracking algorithms, low
| latency posture correction, mocap compression and keyframing,
| fresnel optics, thin layer physics...
|
| Microsoft R&D built and patented many of those things and
| already pushed things through the entire loop from R&D to
| practical "fun" hardware (Kinect) to boring Enterprise
| hardware ("Azure Kinect" and HoloLens) and allegedly back to
| plenty of closed doors R&D again.
|
| It's easy to ignore Microsoft because they "failed" in the
| consumer space a few times in that loop already, but since no
| one has proven yet that there _is_ a long-term consumer space
| (and don 't forget the Kinect actually was a very successful
| consumer item for a brief Wii-epoch moment) and their
| "unsexy" Enterprise tech has found comfortable niches to
| serve it is still very possible to see them as the easy
| "leader" in this space, even if they've never been crazy
| enough to rename the whole company after it.
| stonogo wrote:
| The detail they have failed to pay attention to is "what the
| hell good does this do anyone." Still.
| landswipe wrote:
| No one company will own this space, for it to succeed, it
| needs open standards like the browser.
| MikusR wrote:
| Like the open standards of iPhones?
| jimbob45 wrote:
| I don't think anyone can or will disagree with you. What
| Facebook is doing with VR/AR is technologically beyond
| anything anyone else is doing.
|
| We just don't think the ultimate application of all that
| research is going to be the Metaverse. Pretending that the
| ultimate goal is the Metaverse is masking the fact that this
| VR/AR research is all exploratory. We can assume Wall Street
| would otherwise heavily punish Facebook for investing blindly
| so heavily in R&D. The willingness of Facebook to mask the
| Metaverse as something other than R&D and not Eric's team,
| which allegedly paid for itself, is what is so baffling.
| snoopy_telex wrote:
| Such a weird decision given the results they indicate. Was there
| any rational thought behind the layoffs beyond giving the
| metaverse more dollars?
| quasse wrote:
| Based on input from my friends at Meta, this is a direct side
| effect of the way individual performance is quantified.
|
| Each person is required to "excel" along four axes, the two
| relevant ones for this story are likely "engineering
| excellence" and "impact"
|
| * "Impact" means you made KPIs go up. Specifically KPIs
| relating to getting user eyeballs onto content / ads. Reducing
| costs, designing good systems, reducing developer friction all
| do not count towards your impact. * "Engineering excellence" is
| where every other aspect of being a good developer is lumped
| in. Saved the org $10mm? Sorry, no impact for you, just a point
| in engineering excellence.
|
| Unfortunately, as you can probably guess "impact" is the
| weighted the highest when determining the value of an employee.
| I would guess Eric and his team fell afoul of this aspect of
| the internal political game at Meta.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| I am familiar with this org from my time at Meta and I think
| the author paints a rosier picture of their achievements than I
| would. Let's just say there is more than one side to the story.
| csa wrote:
| > I am familiar with this org from my time at Meta and I
| think the author paints a rosier picture of their
| achievements than I would. Let's just say there is more than
| one side to the story.
|
| 1. No need to beat a man while he is down.
|
| 2. Based on a few verifiable claims the op has made, I'm
| guessing you are missing or willfully ignoring some of the
| big picture details. I might be wrong about this, but I would
| certainly bet 100 push ups on it.
| raydev wrote:
| > I think the author paints a rosier picture of their
| achievements than I would. Let's just say there is more than
| one side to the story.
|
| If this is all you are willing to say here, then there's no
| value to your contribution.
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| apohn wrote:
| It's possible to have teams that save millions of dollars a
| year and not be worth it to keep them.
|
| For the sake of argument, let's say a statistics team has 5
| people.
|
| Cost of Employee at FB, including insurance, office space, 401K
| match, salary, bonuses = 250K/year (probably very
| conservative).
|
| Cost of Data and Software Infrastructure to support them
| (including people to respond to Infrastructure support
| tickets), let's just be very conservative = 100K/year.
|
| Cost of People Management overhead to support them. Includes
| salary of at least one manager, not to mention the time of a
| program manager, project manager, product manager, or whomever
| else. Let's just say 500K/year.
|
| Total = 1.85 Million/Year.
|
| Let's say this team of 5 people comes up models that save the
| company $4M a year. I once had a VP tell me that to justify a
| Data Scientist on the team, they needed to have a savings of
| 10X what they cost the company to have that person on staff. I
| know this logic and math seems very weak and hazy. Mapping
| costs is a strange thing. But this is how some decision makers
| think, and this is how people get cut.
| drc500free wrote:
| These employees are making a lot more than $250k just in base
| salary. Cost is probably closer to $1M each, all in. "A few
| million" in net cost savings isn't much for a team that
| probably costs $5M a year.
|
| It would definitely be better to find another internal home
| (assuming the team is portable without its mother team that
| got cut), but sometimes these decisions are made quickly
| without a lot of granularity. They aren't necessarily going
| to find one sub-team that saves only ~1x their cost in net
| profit and figure out how to transplant them to another org.
|
| He seems to have taken away the important lesson - if you're
| not primary you're in danger.
| vikingerik wrote:
| How in the world are you getting from $250k salary to $1M
| total cost? Stuff like office space and equipment/services,
| health insurance, HR overhead are constants per person,
| they don't scale up with salary. Are you assuming that some
| big bonus or grant package is necessary?
| drc500free wrote:
| Yes, their total comp is $500k+. They are taking up a
| portion of the management time of someone whose total
| comp is approaching (or over) $1M.
|
| Software Engineer: https://www.levels.fyi/companies/faceb
| ook/salaries/software-...
|
| Software Engineering Manager: https://www.levels.fyi/comp
| anies/facebook/salaries/software-...
| johnfn wrote:
| Facebook employees make a lot more than 250k. Someone
| with Eric lippert's level of experience probably makes
| well over 600-700k in total compensation - just see
| levels.fyi!
| athrowaway12 wrote:
| A big portion of the comp especially at higher levels is
| in stock grants... and Meta stock just dropped 75% in
| value this year.
|
| These grants are valued at the market price at time of
| hire (or refresh).
|
| So maybe pre-2022 the comp was 700k...
| TheNewsIsHere wrote:
| The trick with discussing any numbers like this are
| variables that none of us can know without more intimate
| knowledge of a firm. For example, my spouse works for an
| SV firm. His team is 100% WFH, 100% of the time. They
| have no permanently allocated office space in any of the
| company's buildings anywhere in the world.
|
| However, they're paying out bonuses twice a year, annual
| (PB)RSUs, (specifically for us) around almost $30k/yr in
| employer contributions to health insurance and our HSA
| combined, music streaming subscription, and so on.
|
| The benefits, the bonuses, the extras, they all add up
| and are all very company specific. I'm not saying you're
| wrong by any stretch. But with the number of extra
| benefits, healthcare, and everything else that's
| different from employer to employer, we are all just
| guessing.
| trenchgun wrote:
| It was claimed to be millions of net savings per deployed
| model.
| ericlippert wrote:
| The team was all mathematicians. We did the math. I helped
| one of our data scientists put a model into production that
| saved $15M a year from that model alone, and we had a dozen
| people like that. We were working on signal loss models that
| had potential to save billions. I genuinely do not understand
| the logic of cutting this team to save costs.
| drc500free wrote:
| Unfortunately, top-down mandates are imperfect and should
| be avoided as much as possible. Net profit matters to an
| operator who cares about today's profitability, but not at
| all to someone whose paradigm is "thinking in bets" and
| future payoffs. And the street has been rewarding people
| who ignore today's profits in favor of the narrative about
| tomorrow's growth.
|
| From afar, it looks like Meta's leadership is a bunch of
| future thinkers who got told to cut today's costs, and it's
| not a well-practiced muscle for them.
| apohn wrote:
| >I genuinely do not understand the logic of cutting this
| team to save costs.
|
| I've been in a situation where a company was under
| pressure, was trying to make a big pivot, and there where
| multiple rounds of layoffs.
|
| At one point I could only make sense of it by picturing a
| somewhat blind lumberjack getting an order that says
| "There's a forest that needs 15% of trees cut. Go cut."
| Good trees get get, bad trees get cut. Thankfully we are
| not trees and if we get cut we can move on. We don't die
| just because we got chopped down.
| acqq wrote:
| Eric, my best wishes to you, I've also enjoyed reading your
| texts, at these older times when you were allowed to write
| about your work.
|
| Having had some similar experiences to yours now, I don't
| believe there has to be strict logic behind the managerial
| decisions leading to big changes. That's not how they are
| made, and that happens more often and with more impact than
| we typically register in our own environment, as we are
| busy doing our specific tasks. I know that it can sound
| cynical but I think it correctly reflects the reality.
|
| In one specific case from my previous work, I know from
| those present where the decisions were made, that a
| decision about hundreds of people working further of not on
| many running projects was made after one high manager left
| and the few remaining who were the only one deciding
| literally had a short talk: "OK, who wants to take over
| these, I won't, do you?", "no", "no", "me neither." "OK,
| then let's dismount all that." And so it went. And
| similarly, it's not that it was not profitable for the
| company, it was clearly documented. The decision of each of
| those involved was then explainable with "it didn't match
| our vision of where we want to concentrate our company's
| effort." It _is_ sometimes as simple as that. The "high
| managers" so often score additional points whenever they
| decide that the company makes less of different stuff.
|
| Steve Jobs was, of course, famous for abandoning different
| projects in Apple on his comeback, and it provably gave the
| results. But I also see the companies overnight losing the
| proficiency in some fields based on managerial decisions
| impulsively made, performing even worse later. I don't have
| any grand narrative based on these experiences to push,
| except to state my belief that sometimes the "reasons" are
| _extremely_ simple and very, very mundane, to the point of
| causing huge disappointment to those who heard so many
| decisions presented as strictly a result of precise
| measurements and deliberations, who knew they did their
| best and were aware that "nothing was wrong."
|
| It does leave one questioning why they correctly invested
| as much energy in what they did, and if they made right
| decisions during these times, from a newly obtained
| perspective.
| hkon wrote:
| > We were working on signal loss models that had potential
| to save billions
|
| What are signal loss models in this context?
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Doesnt this paragraph indicate that they were making millions
| of dollars in savings OVER their cost of operating?
|
| "The PPL team in particular was at the point where we were
| regularly putting models into production that on net reduced
| costs by millions of dollars a year over the cost of the
| work"
| treis wrote:
| It wouldn't surprise me if someone glanced at the
| "Probabilistic Programming Team" name and said "I don't know
| what that is but I doubt we need it" and added them to the
| chopping block.
| musk_micropenis wrote:
| Facebook/Meta is an engineering-first organisation. There's
| no way that is how it went down.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| Facebook/Meta is a Zuckerburg-first organisation.
|
| Moreover, there are still a lot of decisions being made
| that are basically down to politics rather than engineering
| merit, or there were while I was there.
| cableshaft wrote:
| Meta hired the consultants from Office Space.
| "Probab...probabli... probably not going to work here
| anymore, anyway!"
|
| Scene from Youtube: https://youtu.be/9ZUw8LYOQ-g
| davewritescode wrote:
| The author made it fairly clear why he thought they were let
| go; they weren't in the critical path anywhere.
|
| The only rationalization is that Wall Street is punishing meta
| for spending too much on R&D related to VR and cutting costs to
| the bone is one way to appease the market gods.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Yeah I overlapped with that team at FB, and they were freaking
| amazing. That being said, I suspect that it was a Thunderdome
| type situation where two teams enter, one team leaves. It
| doesn't end up reflecting the value delivered as much as the
| perceived value.
| nemo44x wrote:
| > perceived value.
|
| I think that's the critical word here. Perception is reality
| when it comes to these things. I have no idea but I'd assume
| decision makers do not perceive enough future value coming
| from this team to make it worth keeping them on. They could
| be wrong but no one will ever really know.
| [deleted]
| lokar wrote:
| Meta is never going to solve their apple problem by cutting
| costs. To get back to their old numbers they need users on a
| platform where they make the rules, not apple.
| btown wrote:
| This is really sad to hear. Probabilistic programming languages
| are IMO one of the coolest things ever: if you have an idea about
| how your data could be plausibly generated given some massive
| amount of hidden state and inputs, and an arbitrarily complex
| rendering function, you just _write the rendering function_ and
| it determines probability distributions over the state variables
| that most likely map your inputs to your output.
|
| For instance, say you want to be able to vectorize logos, e.g.
| find the SVG representation of a raster image. If you wanted to
| link a text model of the characters that make up SVG files to
| their raster representation via a modern deep learning system,
| you'd need a heck of a lot of data and training time. But if you
| could instead just write a (subset of a) SVG parser and renderer
| as simply as you'd write it in any other programming language,
| but where the _compiler_ instead creates a chain of conditional
| probability distributions that can be traversed with gradient
| descent, you can reach a highly reliable predictive model with
| significantly less training time and data.
|
| This is where the massive cost savings come in. You get a
| forward-deployed engineer who knows this stuff and can dig into
| the compiler for features not yet implemented, they can work
| magic on any domain problem. I would have loved to have seen the
| spinoff they mentioned. Sigh.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12774459 is an old comment
| that goes more into detail on the tech and has a number of links!
|
| EDIT: see also https://beanmachine.org/ which is OP's team's work
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > But if you could instead just write a (subset of a) SVG
| parser and renderer as simply as you'd write it in any other
| programming language, but where the compiler instead creates a
| chain of conditional probability distributions that can be
| traversed with gradient descent, you can reach a highly
| reliable predictive model with significantly less training time
| and data.
|
| It's a balance between engineer time (headcount costs) and
| training time/costs (infra costs.) Usually engineer time is
| more valuable than training costs. Embedding engineers into
| teams and building cost models is one of those cases where
| probabilistic programming makes a lot more sense than a DL
| approach, but most situations favor the economics of a DL
| approach.
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