> 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!"
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.
> Third, this opinion is indeed extremely common internally.
It is intensely weird to me that people hold the opinion that their company is building something that is bad for the world, and yet they stay there and continue to help build it.
I know that's easy to say as someone not in that situation, but not always easy to do for someone who is. I get that people don't always have a ton of choice about their employment; maybe they are afraid of losing their health insurance, maybe they are on a visa and can't easily switch jobs, or maybe they simply aren't able to find another job that works for them. Less noble, but maybe the pay is just too good, and if they stay for just a bit longer, it will be life changing. I can totally sympathize with that!
But if this opinion is "extremely common", I would expect that a good number of those people would have the ability to leave, to the point that perhaps Zuckerberg would rethink his strategy.
(I don't really buy the "change things from within" explanation; 1) that rarely works, especially in a company the size of Meta, and 2) if tried, that clearly has not worked, given Meta's continuing trajectory.)
"I'm old enough to have read Snow Crash the week it came out and IT WAS A DYSTOPIA, why are we building it?"
This is such an incredible quote, I love it. And I love that you said it in your group chat. I wish more people in tech could see this forest from within the trees.
I am a huge fan of your work, Eric. I started out in PL and ended up in ML, working on far less impactful projects than you did :)
However, I don't believe metaverse is a waste of time, at least for business users. This can eliminate all office space use in about 5-10 years if the hardware and software is ready, which it very likely will. Or maybe a wall to wall LED screen will do the trick for remote social presence, making the headset redundant.
It can spill over from the office to personal lives like the PC did. But anyway, hope you continue to work on cool things.
Having previously worked at a data team before the pandemic eon which raison'd etre was "saving cost", the reality is it didn't.
We used advanced statistical concept and vended models for other teams/services to consume, but the truth is either it was just really obvious cost solutions that they didn't bother, or it didn't really work all that well (stats model are, unfortunately, prone to many interpretations).
I've since moved on to feature based team where I feel like I'm more on the ground. And recently was able to get rid of lots of cost just by.. looking at them. I remain skeptical of the teams that base itself on statistical models to reduce cost.
> 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.
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.
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 bad-valence skepticism and the latter approved optimism.
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.
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.
> 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.
I get that cynicism can be a negative thing, and can drag down people and groups. But I think there's a fine line between cynicism and (constructive) negative feedback. And I wonder if an anti-cynicism culture has the effect of silencing legitimate negative feedback as well.
About cynicism vs. criticism, I'm reminded about something Scott Alexander recounted in his review of Red Plenty, an actual historical event:
(Kantorovich) invented the technique of linear programming, a method of solving optimization problems perfectly suited to allocating resources throughout an economy. He immediately realized its potential and wrote a nice letter to Stalin politely suggesting that his current method of doing economics was wrong and he could do better - this during a time when everyone else in Russia was desperately trying to avoid having Stalin notice them because he tended to kill anyone he noticed. Luckily the letter was intercepted by a kindly mid-level official, who kept it away from Stalin and warehoused Kantorovich in a university somewhere.
Cynicism can be warranted. Of course it's possible to be excessively cynical, but lack of cynicism can be downright deadly. Sometimes you are in situations where you can do little, and the best you can do is still pretty awful. And if you suppress the doubts that could make you cynical, more often than not someone else has to carry those doubts for you, to at least prevent the disasters that ARE preventable.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I got used to them pretty quickly after some initial motion sickness issues and could wear them for quite a while. Multiple hours if I got super into a few games. I'm pretty excited for having VR replace multiple physical monitors. I'm gonna be looking for a new headset in the coming weeks to see if that's viable right now--maybe the new Meta headset. But if something is promising and can render text fairly well, I'm gonna give it a whirl and see how it goes.
Right now the tech obviously has a ton of comfort issues, from motion sickness to fatigue. But it's not hard to imagine a near future where it's a lot more comfortable to wear VR headsets and be able to do some novel things with them. I mean, the first "laptops" were quite burdensome.
I spend about 40 minutes-1 hour/day with my Oculus 2 (just did a 40 minute Fall Out Boy Beatsaber session). But just playing. I've done 2 hour sessions before and they are pretty intense, but not in the eyes (maybe the weight becomes a bit of a strain after 1 hour?).
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.
I never understood the VR hype. Sure it’s cool for games, and both AR and VR could have commercial uses, but people were talking to me like it was going to be the most significant computing revolution since smartphones and we would all be interacting with VR/AR user interfaces primarily in the near future.
Then Meta comes and it seems like it’s just a ripped idea that’s been done multiple times + some buzzword tech and graphics that make Xbox player profiles look good. The idea that this was seemingly going to be some grand new flagship product for the company was laughable from the beginning.
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.
> 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!
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.
Say you have a 100 developers and you reason each should get a second monitor worth 300$, because this increases productivity by 20%.
According to an accountant, you just added 30K in costs to the books, with nothing to show for it. You can't eat productivity nor is it a line item in the books.
Who is to say that this 20% of freed up time is used productively? Or used on things that increase revenue? If so, how much revenue? And when?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Not to nitpick, but 5% improvement profit does not apply to the additional dollar. It applies to all the revenue.... So the improvement could be massive.
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.
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.
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".
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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?).
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 :)
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.
Also cost savings has a hard, well known upper bound but revenue growth is speculative with many opportunities for pleasant fantasy. Business leaders love the idea of being the visionary who takes a big gamble and makes it work.
Facebook is an example of where that breaks down: there isn’t an easy way to grow that much larger so they would likely see greater return from cost savings than they are likely to make from VR, but after a couple decades of thinking of themselves as this incredibly innovative tech company it’s hard to accept that they’re stable as an ad company.
There's also cost savings that are numbers shuffling on a spreadsheet and then there's cost savings that are actually less money leaving the corporate accounts.
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.
> 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.
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
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.)
Ultimately everything will be destroyed anyway... "legacy" is an egotistical concept, if you think you're building anything but sandcastles you're deluding yourself.
Enjoy the process, admire your castle, but never forget the tide will have its day.
> 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.
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.
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.
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)!
There's a big difference knowing ahead of time, also.
If I am hired to do trade secret work I'm already understanding that it will never be "known" even if the product or something associated with it DOES work - and many companies in the world will never be known anyway, let alone their products.
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.
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.
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."
or "people don’t want to lug a computer with them to the beach or on a train to while away hours" (https://qz.com/593329/choice-quotes-from-a-1985-new-york-tim...). Looking around the beach and especially the train, everyone is lugging around a portable computer (phone)
I don't think today's VR/AR is "the thing" but I do think, in the same way people thought Palm Pilots and Windows CE devices were a small niche market for ~15 years and it wasn't until iPhone that the masses finally understood what a pocket device was good for VR/AR will eventually reach a version/device that will be more compelling than smartphones and similarly blow up
It might take until they get to a small dot like "Striking Vipers" but I'm glad at least one company, if not 5, are pushing forward.
Cutting that sentence off there paints a slightly different picture from the full sentence:
> 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”.
Plenty of people want to wear VR goggles, but it's hard to see how the metaverse specifically will take off.
Plenty of people spend time on facebook which is basically one step away from "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 just as much like what critics said about the Segway, which was supposed to revolutionize pedestrian movement, and which ... well, let's just say the critics turned out to be right.
Which is to say, I don't think you can tell much about the stickiness of a technology from what it's proponents say for or against it. History is full of well-hyped failures, and not a few overperforming fringe ideas.
The full line from the article appears to be more along the lines of (and I am paraphrasing here) "no one wants Mark Zuckerberg's cynical and unimaginative interpretation of VR" and not a dismissal of the technology itself.
>This to me sounds similar to "I think there is a world market for maybe 5 computers" That was wrong
>or "people don’t want to lug a computer with them to the beach or on a train to while away hours"
Exactly. It's also just like how "people don't want to wear 3D glasses in a theater". That was wrong too: every single movie today is in 3D.
Oh wait... No movies are in 3D now. They tried (for a 2nd time) and failed and gave up.
VR goggles might get some popularity for gaming, but the "metaverse" thing is just dumb.
AR, however, makes a lot of sense if they can make it convenient. I would love to have some cycling glasses connected by BT to my phone, which show a simple moving map display as I'm riding in the city so I know where to turn, instead of having to stop every so often and pull out my phone to look at where I am.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
I am personally shocked continually at how drastically overvalued seeming engineering is. I read through what he wrote here - Not to be cynical; and I used to be an engineer: but this sounded like a bunch of fluffy B.S.
I used to work at several mega corps. Very overstaffed ones. We had tons of very elite engineers doing god knows what. They always had stories that sounded exactly like this - It’s so complicated you wouldn’t understand!
I believe engineering has become way overvalued relative to what it is worth realistically.
I will give far more credibility to anyone who has built or tried to build and run or manage their own startup or business.
Too many engineers have only ever worked in these environments where they are totally disconnected from reality.
"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."
Readit News
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!"
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.
It is intensely weird to me that people hold the opinion that their company is building something that is bad for the world, and yet they stay there and continue to help build it.
I know that's easy to say as someone not in that situation, but not always easy to do for someone who is. I get that people don't always have a ton of choice about their employment; maybe they are afraid of losing their health insurance, maybe they are on a visa and can't easily switch jobs, or maybe they simply aren't able to find another job that works for them. Less noble, but maybe the pay is just too good, and if they stay for just a bit longer, it will be life changing. I can totally sympathize with that!
But if this opinion is "extremely common", I would expect that a good number of those people would have the ability to leave, to the point that perhaps Zuckerberg would rethink his strategy.
(I don't really buy the "change things from within" explanation; 1) that rarely works, especially in a company the size of Meta, and 2) if tried, that clearly has not worked, given Meta's continuing trajectory.)
This is such an incredible quote, I love it. And I love that you said it in your group chat. I wish more people in tech could see this forest from within the trees.
But at least it was a dystopia where pizza delivery was an exciting business.
Interesting that the book essentially seems to render the "gig economy" as some dystopian element. Quite good prediction.
However, I don't believe metaverse is a waste of time, at least for business users. This can eliminate all office space use in about 5-10 years if the hardware and software is ready, which it very likely will. Or maybe a wall to wall LED screen will do the trick for remote social presence, making the headset redundant.
It can spill over from the office to personal lives like the PC did. But anyway, hope you continue to work on cool things.
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We used advanced statistical concept and vended models for other teams/services to consume, but the truth is either it was just really obvious cost solutions that they didn't bother, or it didn't really work all that well (stats model are, unfortunately, prone to many interpretations).
I've since moved on to feature based team where I feel like I'm more on the ground. And recently was able to get rid of lots of cost just by.. looking at them. I remain skeptical of the teams that base itself on statistical models to reduce cost.
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.
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.
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 bad-valence skepticism and the latter approved optimism.
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.
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.
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.
There’s a fine line between fostering avoidance of cynicism on one side, and fostering koolaiding and yes-manning on the other.
(Kantorovich) invented the technique of linear programming, a method of solving optimization problems perfectly suited to allocating resources throughout an economy. He immediately realized its potential and wrote a nice letter to Stalin politely suggesting that his current method of doing economics was wrong and he could do better - this during a time when everyone else in Russia was desperately trying to avoid having Stalin notice them because he tended to kill anyone he noticed. Luckily the letter was intercepted by a kindly mid-level official, who kept it away from Stalin and warehoused Kantorovich in a university somewhere.
Cynicism can be warranted. Of course it's possible to be excessively cynical, but lack of cynicism can be downright deadly. Sometimes you are in situations where you can do little, and the best you can do is still pretty awful. And if you suppress the doubts that could make you cynical, more often than not someone else has to carry those doubts for you, to at least prevent the disasters that ARE preventable.
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blink twice if you need help?
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.
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?
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.
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.
Soon enough they will be more comparable to glasses than goggles and plenty of people wear glasses for 12-16 hours a day.
Right now the tech obviously has a ton of comfort issues, from motion sickness to fatigue. But it's not hard to imagine a near future where it's a lot more comfortable to wear VR headsets and be able to do some novel things with them. I mean, the first "laptops" were quite burdensome.
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?
Then Meta comes and it seems like it’s just a ripped idea that’s been done multiple times + some buzzword tech and graphics that make Xbox player profiles look good. The idea that this was seemingly going to be some grand new flagship product for the company was laughable from the beginning.
He still took the money, though. That was all I could think about while I was reading that paragraph.
I'll tell you it can't be done, of course, but if you insist I'll work hard at trying to do it.
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.
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!
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.
Say you have a 100 developers and you reason each should get a second monitor worth 300$, because this increases productivity by 20%.
According to an accountant, you just added 30K in costs to the books, with nothing to show for it. You can't eat productivity nor is it a line item in the books.
Who is to say that this 20% of freed up time is used productively? Or used on things that increase revenue? If so, how much revenue? And when?
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.
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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.
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.
Developing the technology to do a thing profitably that previously could not be done profitably is the stuff unicorns are made of.
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.
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.
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".
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.
Only if you want to close the company in ten years
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).
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.
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.
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
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(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?).
Facebook is an example of where that breaks down: there isn’t an easy way to grow that much larger so they would likely see greater return from cost savings than they are likely to make from VR, but after a couple decades of thinking of themselves as this incredibly innovative tech company it’s hard to accept that they’re stable as an ad company.
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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
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.
And yet I don’t see myself retiring once I have enough money in a few years
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.)
Enjoy the process, admire your castle, but never forget the tide will have its day.
keep on fighting the good fight, and good luck
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.
> I need a good long corporate detox before I go looking again.
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.
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)!
If I am hired to do trade secret work I'm already understanding that it will never be "known" even if the product or something associated with it DOES work - and many companies in the world will never be known anyway, let alone their products.
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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.
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.
You read it wrong.
This to me sounds similar to "I think there is a world market for maybe 5 computers" (https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=164a442a-1b90...). That was wrong
or "people don’t want to lug a computer with them to the beach or on a train to while away hours" (https://qz.com/593329/choice-quotes-from-a-1985-new-york-tim...). Looking around the beach and especially the train, everyone is lugging around a portable computer (phone)
I don't think today's VR/AR is "the thing" but I do think, in the same way people thought Palm Pilots and Windows CE devices were a small niche market for ~15 years and it wasn't until iPhone that the masses finally understood what a pocket device was good for VR/AR will eventually reach a version/device that will be more compelling than smartphones and similarly blow up
It might take until they get to a small dot like "Striking Vipers" but I'm glad at least one company, if not 5, are pushing forward.
Cutting that sentence off there paints a slightly different picture from the full sentence:
> 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”.
Plenty of people want to wear VR goggles, but it's hard to see how the metaverse specifically will take off.
Which is to say, I don't think you can tell much about the stickiness of a technology from what it's proponents say for or against it. History is full of well-hyped failures, and not a few overperforming fringe ideas.
>or "people don’t want to lug a computer with them to the beach or on a train to while away hours"
Exactly. It's also just like how "people don't want to wear 3D glasses in a theater". That was wrong too: every single movie today is in 3D.
Oh wait... No movies are in 3D now. They tried (for a 2nd time) and failed and gave up.
VR goggles might get some popularity for gaming, but the "metaverse" thing is just dumb.
AR, however, makes a lot of sense if they can make it convenient. I would love to have some cycling glasses connected by BT to my phone, which show a simple moving map display as I'm riding in the city so I know where to turn, instead of having to stop every so often and pull out my phone to look at where I am.
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.
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33806727
So if the team was around 20 people that already doesn't make sense.
I used to work at several mega corps. Very overstaffed ones. We had tons of very elite engineers doing god knows what. They always had stories that sounded exactly like this - It’s so complicated you wouldn’t understand!
I believe engineering has become way overvalued relative to what it is worth realistically.
I will give far more credibility to anyone who has built or tried to build and run or manage their own startup or business.
Too many engineers have only ever worked in these environments where they are totally disconnected from reality.
"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."