having been an early employee and founder of a few startups and then working at a few larger companies, most people who only ever worked at FAANG have no idea how much more productive tiny teams with ownership are.
AI is making everyone faster that I’ve seen. I’d say 30% of the tickets I’ve seen in the last month have been solved by just clicking the delegate to AI button
I'll be honest, just the idea of working there makes me feel like vomiting. For me, they are bizarrely evil. They're not evil like, "we're going to destroy our competition through anti competitive practices," (which they do), but "let's destroy a whole generation of minds."
And now with the glasses. I mean, jeeze. Can there be a stronger signal of not caring for others?
It's as if Meta sees people as cattle.
Though I think a lot of techies see humans as cattle, truthfully.
What was your rationale?
I guess this question is out-of-the-blue, and I don't mean for you to justify your existence, but I've never understood why people choose to work for Meta.
I feel the same - would I like a meta paycheck, sure, but I couldn't look at myself in the mirror knowing what the company I'm giving my work to does to people's brains (not just the young, though that is the most reprehensible).
I told my son I would disown him if he worked for Facebook, for the reasons stated above.
Then he took a contracting gig for Meta. His rationalization was that the project was an ill-specified prototype that would never see the light of day - if they wanted to throw money at him for stuff like that, he would accept it.
That gig is finished, and he's now thoroughly disillusioned with working for big tech.
From this angle, what's the difference between Meta and a junk food company?
Both sell things that are bad for you, but that the consumer has complete control over whether or not to consume.
And not all of what Meta is selling is bad. There's a lot of information exchanged on Facebook, Instagram, etc. that are good for society. Like health/nutrition advice, etc.
I've always attributed it to people being very good at convincing themselves they aren't one of the bad guys. A big paycheck makes it even easier to ignore to what you are a part of.
Where livelihood is concerned, rational individuals with strong morals can do irrational, and immoral things (e.g., work at the Palantir's of the world).
TLDR: incentives don't just shape perception, they form it
I have a theory that when you have 2 developers working in synergy, you're at something like 1.8x what 1 person can do. As you add more people you approach 2x until some point after which you start to decrease productive. I don't think that point is far beyond 5.
This is very close to the thesis, or at least theme, of the essays in The Mythical Man-Month, Fred Brooks. Some elements are dated (1975), but many feel timeless.
Brooks law “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later” is just the surface of some of the metaphorical language that has most stuck with me: large systems and teams quickening entanglement in tar pits through their struggle against coordination scaling pains, conceptual integrity in design akin to preserving architectural unity of Reims cathedral, roles and limitations attempting to expand surgical teams, etc.
Love a good metaphor, even when its foundation is overextended or out of date. Highly recommend.
My experience of pair programming is the opposite. In a pair I get maybe 4x as much done as when working alone.
Mostly it's because when we hit a point where one person would get stuck, the other usually knows what to do, and we sail through almost anything with little friction.
Maybe the multiplier is 4x and by the time you have a team of ten you're back down to 2x? My theory is a bit of a hyperbole and I don't know what the multipliers would be? But I know that many times you can move quick when you're small.
And to your point, a single person can easily get stuck, I know that applies to me many times.
There's that but youre missing a lot of variables.
E.g. if one of you had perfect sleep and the other didn't the individual with perfect sleep will perform better for longer.
I don't get why people try to simplify - you're removing important details that determine performance and therefore output. This leads to false conclusions.
This. Hell even a company that is 100 people or more. Ive seen companies just grind to snails pace around 80-90 people and then still scale to 400-500 and then it's impossible to really do anything meaningful. I have tried to test for this in interviews over the years but ultimately I just end up disappointed. At this point I don't even look, just work in small independently organized groups or coops.
I'm excited about Agents helping many tiny teams succeed. There has been hype around the "who will be the first solo founder to a billion" but I am hoping for many small teams to succeed and I think this is the more interesting story.
I agree its in the 2-7 person range.
The challenge for those teams is distribution. They will crush at building, but I'm not sure how they can crack distribution. Some will, but maybe there is a way to help thousands of small teams distribute.
Big corporations are full with people who love to entertain 20+ people in video calls. 1-2 people speak, the other nod their heads while browsing Amazon.
Well, you should be terrified of those jobs vanishing I think.
All of these people will consequently be on the job market competing for your opportunities.
Yes you may feel superior to their capabilities - and may even be justified in your opinion (I know nothing about you beyond this comment)... But it'll still significantly impact your professional future if this actually happens. It would massively impact wages at the very least
Your viewpoint is incredibly short-sighted and not actually realizing the broad effect on the industry as a whole such a change would bring.
Maybe I’m naive but I’m not terrified about the future at all.
Every efficiency wave made life better for humans. Why should this one be different?
Assume many people lose their jobs. This in turn means companies will have higher margins. Higher margins attract more competition. More competition means lower margins since some will use the lower costs to offer lower prices.
Lower prices increase quality of life for everyone.
People who lost their job might be able to pick up doing something they actually enjoy…
> People who lost their job might be able to pick up doing something they actually enjoy…
That's so out of touch.
First, you're conveniently ignoring the possibility that people actually like the job they are about to lose.
And believe it or not most people aren't toiling away at jobs they hate because it never occurred to them to do something they like more. They work jobs they dislike because it's the only choice they have because they have to pay their bills so they can survive and so that their dependents can have an acceptable life.
Throughout history, what were once middle class and artisan professions were increasingly automated and tons of people and their families ended up in poverty until they died.
We just gloss over them and villify the ones who tried to do anything about it (the ones that weren't executed also died in poverty).
Yeah this always get's completely glossed over in these conversations.
People always say: "Things ended up working out in the end"
Things only worked out in the sense that society carried on without all the people who lost their jobs.
The U.S. has recent examples of large scale job destruction.
Michigan: From 2000-2009. Massive job destruction. 330,000 auto workers in 2000. Down to 109,000 in 2009. Estimates are that 1/3-1/2 of all those affected never achieved equal/similar employment. That is, somewhere around ~70k-120k workers never earned as much as they previously did. Since this was msotly contained within one city (Detroit), it's pretty easy for the country to ignore it and go on with their lives.
(Detroit was in decline since the 50's really. 2000-2009 is just a particularly bad snapshot.)
Coal mining towns have experienced the same phenomenon but more gradually. The poverty left behind by the destruction of those jobs has never been addressed.
With AI, we are heading into a situation where potentially a much larger amount of people will be affected. So maybe that changes the calculus on the government stepping in and fixing the problem. But I wouldn't count on it.
> Since this was mostly contained within one city (Detroit)
It's concentrated in Detroit but also distributed throughout the state, as you can observe in the census.gov slides.
The devastation is regional. It's been a wild experience, watching it all fall apart over the last 40+ years. The decay is immense and impossible to convey to someone from a rich state. Someone from the Eastern Bloc might get it, but I've never been able to communicate it to a Californian. Hop in a car and drive from town to town. Once-prosperous communities are boarded up and gradually reclaimed by nature. Department stores are converted into soup kitchens or marijuana dispensaries.
"Things will work themselves out" is not a law of nature, unless we broaden our definition of "things working out" to include outcomes like "everyone young enough flees, everyone else clutches their savings until they eventually die impoverished."
But with AI, even outcomes like that might be overly optimistic. Where will young people flee to? Where can they go, what trade can they learn, to be safe enough to eventually die in comfort?
When I look at Michigan I see both the past and the future, and I am planning accordingly.
You need to be careful with these things. Such exaggerated narratives are the reason people are afraid.
during the Industrial Revolution many artisan and skilled trades lost their livelihoods.
And yet, while many people did suffer serious short-term hardship and wage collapse, most did not simply remain in lifelong poverty, because over time industrialization created new types of employment and average wages eventually rose.
You don’t want to go back to before the Industrial Revolution. Do you?
I think you need to read up more on living conditions and the violent labor movements in that era. Why they started, what they fought for and what they won for you.
We don't need a defiant mini-sermon and it's very poor conduct to use the term "blatantly lie" for a fellow community member who is just expressing their understanding of a topic. It is never morally necessary to abuse people on this site. This is a community not a battleground.
If you have a different understanding of the topic, share it, so all can benefit. That's what people do when they are sincere about contributing positively here.
If instead you insist on continuing to use abusive terms towards others here, we'll have to ban the account.
