Today is the tenth anniversary of moving my blog to ericlippert.com on my last day at Microsoft, the fiftieth anniversary of my birth, and my last day at Facebook-now-Meta.
My team — Probabilistic Programming Languages — and indeed entire “Probability” division were laid off a couple weeks ago; the last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned.
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.
The whole Probability division was laid off as a cost-cutting measure . I have no explanation for how this was justified and I note that if the company were actually serious about cost-cutting, they would have grown our team, not destroyed it.
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”.
Ugh.
I would be happy to be shown to be wrong, wrong, wrong. Maybe there is a useful, engaging, fun, just, equitable, democratic, sustainable, novel VR experience where the avatars have legs, but Meta is $20 billion in and aside from the legs I don’t see any evidence that any of the above is forthcoming.
Yes, I am a little vexed.
Don’t threaten me with a good time
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1599873531457568768?s=20&t=wsQHxIJub7exTO1QR-Tscw
Riverman and Matty Y agreeing as usual.
Guy who spent all day every day saving Zuck money (likely by identifying colleagues to lay off) is disgruntled Facebook was moving away from its core competency of being one of the internet’s biggest malefactors
Literally anyone other than like service workers who chose to work at fucking Facebook can get fucked. Jesus Christ what an astonishing lack of self awareness.
If someone wanted to pay me $600k/yr to look for inefficiencies in large-scale systems, I’d take it.
It doesn’t sound like he was getting people laid off, just looking at infrastructure, code, processes, etc. If that makes someone’s job redundant, they probably didn’t have a very interesting job anyway. If they’re good the company will find something else for them.
The entitlement of tech workers is truly astonishing. These people were making like 3x the average compensation for doctors inclusive of equity grants and they’re just not getting that the party is over.
For some. But I doubt the ones that survive layoffs are going to be given pay cuts to $180k.
The next generation of FAANG workers is probably not gonna have it so good.
Including equity over the last five years this is likely materially undershooting (if they actually sold vested shares)
It doesn’t help that the tech industry is full of libertarian types that think that if they were getting paid 3X doctors it was because they were obviously doing things at least 3X more important and valuable than what doctors do.
Can someone ELI5 why TikTok is a scourge?
From what I can tell, it’s a combination of mostly these things:
- all the pitfalls that come with social media (social pressure & bullying, security, etc)
- their algorithm is more engaging which keeps people on the app more and amplifies the problems with point 1
- concerns about data collection because the company is Chinese, but this mostly comes off as xenophobia to me because every social media app collects a shit load of user data. It seems their collection of data is maybe more intrusive (I personally doubt that), but if it is, that data almost certainly improves their algorithm.
Tiktok somehow convinced a generation that Hellen Keller wasn’t a real person.
It does seem like an absolutely ridiculous story. How the fuck do you teach language to someone who is blind and deaf? Seems unpossible.
I’m kind of questioning it now myself.
I read a fictionalized account of Helen Keller’s education when I was a kid. The breakthrough came when her teacher ran water over Keller’s hand and repeatedly made the signs W-A-T-E-R into her hand. This was after something like a month of Keller failing to make the connection. After Keller understood that sequences of signs could represent things which were familiar to her she made rapid progress. Obsessive progress really. It’s not like she had much else going on.
John Carmack (creator of doom/id software) is leaving Meta as CTO. He was hardcore pushing the metaverse but seems he got frustrated.
Meta’s quixotic attempt to do VR/metaverse stuff reminds me of early attempts at handheld computing. It’s not that they’re wrong that it will eventually be a thing, it’s that the tech isn’t there and the Apple Newton is a useless clunky piece of shit that people don’t want to have rammed down their throats.