alt Hacker NewsMeta's embrace of A.I. is making its employees miserable
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Here's how things play out: Zuck gets some idea, he's surrounded by a bunch of yes men who say "yes, this will definitely change the world", then it turns into this optics game of kissing the ring. You ask yourself "how could they blow 80B on the Metaverse like that", this is how.
DON'T JOIN META, no matter how fast the recruiters reply to your messages. No matter how cool the work sounds (the managers lie in team matching). There's a reason why the average tenure is <2 years.
It's a toxic and fear based culture. You join, the people around you are already thinking how to scapegoat you. People gatekeep actual work and save it for political favorites and everyone else on the outside is stuck cooking up bullshit projects. If you do manage to find work on your own, people will immediately start scheming to steal it
I think there is a bit of wider social norms piece missing as well on AI use in knowledge work context.
Someone forwarded an enormous amount of text over teams the other day at work. From someone (bless her) that always means well but usually averages about one spelling mistake per word and rarely goes over 20 words per message. Clearly copy paste chatgpt.
For say hn gang that thinks in terms of context shifts, information load and things on THAT wave length the problem with that situation is obvious but I realised then that is not at all obvious to the average public. She genuinely seemed to think she's helping me by spending 15 seconds typing in a prompt and having me spend the next 30 minutes untangling the AI slop.
There is zero understanding or consensus of acceptable practices around that sort of thing baked into societal norms right now.
Well, yeah, management sees a weak labor market and imagines the ability to fire all those troublesome engineers. Remember, especially in recent years, tech management is made up predominantly of grads from a select set of "elite" universities, whose caliber is determined mostly by how rich the parents are. It's no surprise we're in a moment of extreme labor disdain. The idea engineers with years of education are as fungible as manual labor has been tried again and again with the same results. LLMs won't change that.
Mark hates leakers, so it is kind of intensely funny that the NYT seems to have a direct line to probably dozens of ICs. Ultimately, it's hard to keep secrets shared with 70,000 employees.
I noticed a lot more joy using AI from people at smaller companies or working by themselves :)
I say this as someone self employed that burned almost $1000 on tokens last month. And had. A lot of fun doing it.
As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation
> it is cutting jobs to offset its A.I. spending, saying last month that it would slash 10 percent of its work force.
> Meta also introduced internal dashboards to track employees’ consumption of “tokens,” a unit of A.I. use that is roughly equivalent to four characters of text, four people said. Some said the dashboards were a pressure tactic to encourage competition with colleagues. That led some employees to make so many A.I. agents that others had to introduce agents to find agents, and agents to rate agents, two people said.
Maybe the first to be laid off should be the ones that thought it made sense to track token consumption. Goodhart's Law doesn't even apply in this scenario because that's a dumb metric whether or not you're using it to evaluate employees.
> “This data is very tightly controlled,” Mr. Bosworth replied. “This will not be a leak risk.”
Ooof. Famous last words.
They mention Meta's layoffs, which probably have more impact on employee morale than the AI stuff.
My current theory of tech layoffs is that over the last decade or so, churn-inducing practices like stack-ranking have gone out of vogue. One can speculate as to why this happened. Perhaps generational made middle management unwilling to do the dirty work? Nevertheless it happened.
However, companies still want to, and some would argue need to, eliminate low performers, so now they periodically do a companywide reduction in force and frame it with whatever justification is handy, macroeconomic conditions, AI, whatever.
This hypothesis would explain phenomena like companies hiring aggressively during or after a layoff, and why the layoffs keep happening year after year.
As someone who hasn’t spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I’m not shocked at all.
I believe that any kind of partial automation is going to make the job more soul-crushing.
Ford style assembly lines made the work of the factory workers more miserable. Partially automated cashier did the same thing.
I don't think there is any point in trying to resist automation, as the efficiency benefits are too important.
It occurred to me recently that AI's degradation of the human factor via way of increased pressure on the remaining ranks of humans might actually be far more damaging than the AI's output itself.
I love the quote in there from Boz that basically says "no you can't opt out fuck off"
Not going to lie, I have no pity for the tech employees of a company that has spent most of its existence making the world a worse place. They are finally getting a taste of the medicine Facebook has been giving to everyone in the last 2 decades.
from a different perspective, there are way more people who are truly miserable these days comparing to these who earn probably more than half a million per year on average. we must live in parallel universe.
unionize
On top of token tracking, they're also scoring employees on how much they teach Ai to their colleagues. As bad as the token dashboard sounds, employees being forced to try to mine each other for credit sounds worse.
Is there any CEO out there as insecure as zuckerberg?
I believe that's the point.
Well, that's the goal of AI Skynet - it has no need for humans. Did nobody learn from that movie?
Modern elites forgot that treating workers nicely was the compromise we as a society settled on because the alternative is pitchforks and torched homes.
Meta has been banning it's core users for months now, above 20 million users are now banned, they are on death spiral after that Metaverse fiasco.
https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/nbc-5-responds/meta-users-contin...
MEta made billions on AI in 2025, 10% of their revenue... by allowing scammers to use AI to attack users and steal user's money.
It's hard not to look at Meta and come away with any conclusion other than they shit the bed. Hard.
I think the last good move Meta made was buying IG. Maybe not good for IG users but absolutely a great move for Meta. Not quite as good as Google buying Youtube but it's up there. Best $1 billion any company has probably spent.
But Facebook is a graveyard of conspiracy theory Debras, anti-vaxxers and your racist uncle just posting links all day. Sharing links was a contentious decision and it clearly improves short-term engagement but (IMHO) it destroys the platfrom's initial purpose of keeping in touch with friends and family.
Let's not forget too that Meta spent probably billions on building its own crypto (ie Libra). But that was just a taste of what was to come. The Metaverse was one of the largest boondoggles in corporate history. $70B+ with no product-market fit. It was an entirely ego-driven "build it and theyw ill come" moment from somebody who doesn't know waht to do with the empire he's built who is surrounded by Yes Men.
Facebook and AI feels a lot like Microsoft and mobile. Microsoft just completely missed the boat based on poor leadership and conflicting priorities (eg wanting one Windows code base for all devices). Facebook has a huge corpus of human communication and engagement, which should be a treasure trove for building AI but I don't think anybody really believes Meta knows what they're doing or will get anywhere doing it.
I've seen in this in big tech companies: big initatives get well-funded. Seasoned veterans swoop in and cash the fattest checks (in bonus stock) until the entire thing falls apart. Think Google Wave.
What I really think is going to kill these companies is the corporate layoffs or, rather, what they represent. They represent big tech companies turning into Corporate America where politics defines your careers, the company seems incapable of doing anything due to competing fiefdoms (a la Intel) and middle management just reorganizes every 6-12 months so nobody in management ever faces the consequences of their actions.
Monitoring your employees keystrokes with AI ins't going to help either. But management (or the consultants they end up paying) are never going to come to the conclusion that the problem is management.
I am not a big fan of unions, but we need some form of union as soon as possible.
This isn't newsworthy and I'm sick of propaganda.
Every big tech company's embrace of AI is making all of their employees miserable.
Whereas if you're half-competent and at a startup, the AI is an incredible opportunity to try to leap ahead while the prices are subsidized (by the big tech behemoths fighting wth each other)
The reason is a complete inversion of Ownership and Agency.
For a decade of ZIRP, big tech convinced its employees that they're "changing the world", and what we did mattered. Sure the exhorbitant salaries and constantly rising stock value didn't hurt, but honestly other than the FIRE cultists, for most of us the difference between 200k/year and 800k/year didn't feel much day to day (other than the ability to buy a house or something, and feel safe with a retirement nest egg). No, most people were missionaries not mercanaries.
2021 was the first crack. The comps went crazy, half the industry turned over, and the ones who didn't felt a bitter sting where it became blatantly clear that all the new arrivals were just in it for the $$$, and the companies were willing to pay for the backfills but not to reward the loyalty of the missionaries.
Then came the yearly layoffs, chipping away further, and reminding every employee that they're at the mercy of a spreadsheet and the whims of people 3 levels above them in the org chart, in spite of the economic reality of their product, or their personal productivity.
And now we're here, and it's clear that all of the above is still relevant. The old-timers that hung around see that their personal output doesn't matter, their product's PnL doesn't matter. All that matters is 1) the company's AI strategy (and if they're not part of it, they're secondary), and 2) tokenmaxing.
How can anyone find joy in this environment unless they're purely in it for the comp?
I couldn't. I left my big tech job in December after 15 years, and have not been this happy at work since pre-COVID.
[dead]
I fear it's only a matter of time until someone with nothing to lose does more than throw a molotov as Sama's house.
In 2019 I suggested[0] you might reach AGI if you train on computer usage - mouse movement, keypresses, what's on the screen etc. - and it sounds like Meta are kind of trying some form of it.
https://archive.is/JUPmz