Gergely Orosz reports Meta is walking back harsh engineering directives, including 24/7 screen recording and reassignment to AI data labeling

Last I checked Mark Zuckerberg calls all the shots and Meta supposedly has a CTO as well

Engineers I talk to packing and leaving are doing because they sense the company no longer treats them like a profit center that was how it used to be till recently, and is at most tech co’s

@GergelyOrosz The most interesting thing is they have them doing leetcodes all day, which is odd training data for replacing software engineers

@GergelyOrosz It is because acquiring Scale and making Alexandr Wang, a sweatshop guy, the director of AI.

Ask for sweatshop and you shall receive a sweatshop.

@GergelyOrosz …they didn’t realize they were destroying the culture already some time in the last 3-5 years?

@hexednobility 1. its not standard practice in any startup or Big Tech. Only in houry-based remote contract work like Upwork, some of the lowest paid

2. you ever log into anything pesonal at work? Congrats, it's now in the training data. Your password probably as well, no way to turn it off

@YoshkaMJ I’m talking about eng culture and it was just fine, slowly evolving as most other similar-sized companies

It’s not unprompted, it’s clearly because they believe that this is necessary for them to catch up to the frontier labs, and they value that opportunity above everything else

Not saying it will for sure end up being the best business decision, but the reasoning for why they are doing this is quite straightforward imo

@GergelyOrosz Left Meta after experiencing some of this. But I think all this aggressive behavior is “justified” - no new product, issues with Ads revenue future (lawsuites, gov pressure on social platforms), so trying to catch up on AI front. Maybe MZ has general downsizing in mind as well.

@GergelyOrosz to me it feels like they’ve been making bad cultural decisions for a while now and these are just the latest… never ending layoffs and extremely high low-performer quotas are the ones that immediately come to mind

@GergelyOrosz meanwhile somewhere in meta someone types in the "I FOLLOWED YOUR GOD DAMN PLAN AND THIS HAPPENED"

Followed by Ai going

"You're so right. I didn't think about the humans"🤣

@GergelyOrosz I don’t understand the announcement and subsequent push back of “24/7 monitoring of screens”

Complete surveillance over company devices is standard practice.

Maybe the use case is novel but the capture should be normal and expected for employees but why even announce it?

@GergelyOrosz It is not standard practice to record constantly but it is standard to be technically capable of doing so and to be permitted under employee agreements.

Capable vs. doing so is a relatively minor difference IMO

@GergelyOrosz > - Started to record every dev’s screen in the US 24/7

Gosh, when is this ever a sane idea?

May be sourcing data for “devs on AI data labelling team” 🤣

@GergelyOrosz Zuck gets off on trying to emulate Chinese slave labor.

@GergelyOrosz

@GergelyOrosz The more I see such situations, the more it feels like organisations eventually arrive at the very point they are trying to avoid at all costs

@GergelyOrosz I think Meta never had culture in the 1st place 🤷‍♂️

@GergelyOrosz Do you think this might be alexander wang's influence

@ViaOliveEyes @GergelyOrosz > Started to record every dev’s screen in the US 24/7

I thought they always did that, right? Almost every big tech does it on their corpo machines with mdm enrollment? Safe to assume most at least take regular screenshots.

Most CEOs and CFOs of tech and non-tech companies have been brainwashed by consulting firms into viewing tech departments as nothing more than an overhead expense to be stripped down to the bone and offshored not a department that can be a strategic difference and generate revenue.