Hackathons are not working more. They’re supposed to be a liberal period to work on whatever seems interesting to the workers. In Meta’s early days, they were a big part of their culture and Zuck in particular fed on them.
I don’t expect everyone to know anything about Silicon Valley hackathons, but no, they’re not just “more work.” However when people are already crushed by what’s going on at work, they don’t have a lot of creative energy just looking for an outlet.
In my experience, no one working for Meta does so for “spirit.” There are two kinds of people there:
Extremely smart and business savvy, there to make lots of money and pretty good at doing so. These people tend to be a little older and more cutthroat. They don’t have “spirit” to be crushed. They will stay or leave on financials alone.
Younger crowd, largely straight from college, working across product, engineering, and other operations roles. These folks don’t have “spirit” per se - they have operated on large paychecks and a high energy work environment full of the brainy types they roomed with at college. A posh office full of free amenities is half of what kept them going and the other half was youthful hormones fueled by each other and a general sense of being on top of the world by virtue of working there.
THAT last part has been crushed, but it is not what I would call “spirit” or “soul.” More like a collective delusion that fed on its own momentum. Like anything else so divorced from reality, it was always going to crash. It’s amazing they kept it going as long as they did.
Musk faces challenges attracting engineers
No shit. I have no idea who still works at Xitter. I think they must have whittled it down to workaholic Nazi pigs who personally share in Elon’s psychopathy. Because no self respecting tech workers would put up with his bullshit when there’s a whole industry they could go work in.
SpaceX is different. Aerospace is a narrower field and SpaceX is truly at the forefront of it. For a time, Tesla was also at the forefront of its field, doing things that no one else was.
But Xitter and xAI or whatever the fuck it’s called… they have zero advantages with which to attract engineering talent. Elon doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing when it comes to software and never has. He tries to push tech workers around the same way, he’s going to find they can get other jobs at superior organizations and likely for more money.
It’s an almost universal problem. Everything wants to grow so it starts doing things their existing users don’t like, because they’re trying to appeal to people they don’t already have.
There used to be significant differences in performance that drove browser choices. The top dog browser always had a way of getting fat and slow and then something else would come along. This is how Chrome got its start. But today’s much more powerful hardware hides a lot of poor performance, and most web bottlenecks are in the content (ads and shitty site design) where the browser can only make a small difference.
Their situation is: they’re a tired social media site that is traded on the stock exchange and it’s just all downhill for them unless they change something big. They do want to be Steve Jobs, the guy who created a trillion dollar platform ecosystem, and they think hey we can use our social media site as one big ad for it to get things going. What else are you going to do with a tired social media property? You can at least fool some shareholders by telling them no, we have a whole new chapter about to begin. It’s a stupid game, I think driven more by market capitalism than personal ego, though of course there’s also plenty of that.
They’re trying to create a new something. and there doesn’t seem to be another idea. The iPhone really only blew up the world because of the quality of its execution. The idea had been bouncing along for a long time. So every asshole thinks “we’ll just execute right and nail this thing.”
Yes we’ve begun to track “token use” all over my company so it doesn’t spiral out of control, as it easily can do when you have agents managing agents connecting to MCP servers that themselves use the models to generate responses. The engineers around me say that they basically have multiple agents cranking full time and just keep an eye on them every so often. They will even queue up things to run overnight to make use of the time. They never actually close their laptops. This is an insane amount of usage, well beyond what anyone can do in the ChatGPT application by typing with their fingers, and there’s no way it can continue like this.
You have to hand it to NVidia. People only have two complaints about their products: that they cost too much and are constantly sold out.
Oh so you mean it’s an “artificial problem” as in they are “solving” a problem they created themselves. Not that there isn’t actually a problem.
I might support this point of view if the last 20 years of lifespan promises with new light bulb technology had actually been true.
I thought we all agreed there is a problem with headlights these days? Is it just not because of LEDs specifically?
There’s an active onwers forum for these on Reddit if you’d like to see what more people think.
Chevy Bolt - first American car I’ve ever owned and we absolutely love it.
I hope to never buy another. We have an ICE minivan as a second car and it compliments our compact EV well. But 10/10 I prefer driving and maintaining the EV. I always knew EVs were quick, but I didn’t expect how quiet they would be. I can actually hear my music.
This is a rage bait headline for the masses who don’t understand what it means to have a work-issued phone.
As I have one for work which is not my personal phone. And it is totally enterprise-managed so they put whatever apps they want on it and block anything they want. It’s their phone essentially. This headline seems like a nothingburger to me.
It’s not.
What I meant was you can dismiss people for poor performance, but that’s the only valid reason. You cannot lay people off in Japan in the sense of “we cut the budget and decided we don’t want to employ you anymore.”
However, that said… if you want to lay someone off, you can jump through a million hoops. I have seen people relegated to ridiculously inappropriate roles to convince them to leave. You can also mess with non-salary compensation if you want. And you can offer generous severance. And maybe you can convince people to let you “lay them off.”
I knew more than many that worked there, just by actually reading their terms, and understand the mindset behind them.
Yeah okay, guy. You know more about it than people with direct experience. In fact their direct experience only clouds their minds!
You have a dangerous kind of arrogance. The kind that makes you think you know what’s best for others more than they do just by your piercing insight.
You also patently don’t understand how to read a TOS. They are by design incredibly over-reaching and self-interested to the exclusion of the rights of others. This is a legal fiction they reserve in advance so that no matter the eventuality, they can claim you agreed to it. It represents the uttermost limit of what they can imagine. Not the center of gravity of what it’s like to work there.
Anyway, I don’t need to hear more about how your insight penetrates the world from the comfort of your chair.
Oh well, you should actually talk to some of them sometime. A lot of very bright, otherwise decent kids go straight from college to Meta and they think they’ll be doing good. One guy I knew spent his entire job working at keeping ISIS from using Facebook to organize. He didn’t go home at night thinking he was a terrible person.
Of course Meta is just a caricature of an evil corporation from a distance but it becomes more complex the closer you get to it.
With the great reality distortion field they had going there, the problem for a lot of staff was not ethics but perception. They were good people thinking they were doing good work but lacked perspective (not ethics themselves).
Of course someone can say “everyone should know FB is evil, there’s no excuse” but this is a classic case of “I can’t imagine why anyone would ever think something different than what I think.” Which, in itself, is just a lack of perspective. Funny how basically all humans suffer from that. You can chip away at this problem by asking yourself “why would a reasonable person think that?” instead of just going around saying “well then you’re stupid / evil” anytime anything outside your POV comes along.