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?

@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 > - 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.

@GergelyOrosz both Zuck and Wang are stupid

@crucifore @GergelyOrosz Your wisdom is as absolute as the glory of Draconis 🫡

@crucifore @GergelyOrosz What post / title would Mark have on Draconis, Sorcerer Crucifore?

@smiil @GergelyOrosz У меня есть впечатление что в 2024 это и пытались делать (наш ic9 это транслировал), но быстро выяснилось, что люди не воспринимают всерьез genai слоп (только мемы, кеки или кринж заходит), так что рекламодатели не захотели через эту медиа продвигаться.