Curious: what motivates the Canadian government to implement such law? It's not like Canada wants to be a police state in anyway. On the contrary, Canadian government looks pretty chill most of the time, except maybe during the Covid era when they were hellbent on implementing the Covid policies. Or it's the same "for your own good and the state knows how to take care of you" kind of European shit?
> I don't think that AIs have become more trustworthy, the errors are just more subtle.
Honest question: what about the counter-argument that humans make subtle mistakes all the time, so why do we treat AI any differently?
A difference to me is that when we manually write code, we reason about the code carefully with a purpose. Yes we do make mistakes, but the mistakes are grounded in a certain range. In contrast, AI generated code creates errors that do not follow common sense. That said, I don't feel this differentiation is strong enough, and I don't have data to back it up.
One answer, as another person pointed out, is that LLM mistakes are just different. They are less explicable, less predictable, and therefore harder to spot. I can easily anticipate how an inexperienced engineer is going to mess up their first pull request for my project. I have no idea what an LLM might do. Worse, I know it might ace the first fifty pull requests and then make an absolutely mind-boggling mistake in the 51st one.
But another answer is that human autonomy is coupled to responsibility. For most line employees, if they mess up badly enough, it's first and foremost their problem. They're getting a bad performance review, getting fired, end up in court or even in prison. Because you bear responsibility for your actions, your boss doesn't have to watch what you're up to 24x7. Their career is typically not on the line unless they're deeply complicit in your misbehavior.
LLMs have no meaningful responsibility, so whoever is operating them is ultimately on the hook for what they do. It's a different dynamic. It's probably why most software engineers are not gonna get replaced by robots - your director or VP doesn't want to be liable for an agent that goes haywire - but it's also why the "oh, I have an army of 50 YOLO agents do the work while I'm browsing Reddit" is probably not a wise strategy for line employees.
Obviously, the measure isn’t mistakes per day, it’s mistakes per LOC. And that’s not the whole story either - AI self-corrects in addition to being corrected by the operator. If the operator’s committed bugs/LOC rate is as low as the unaugmented programmer’s bugs/LOC, you always choose the AI operator. If it’s higher, it might still be viable to choose them if you care about velocity more than correctness. I’m a slow, methodical programmer myself, but it’s not clear to me that I have a moat.
This is like having a coworker who's as skilled as you if not more skilled, but also an alien.
Their mental model doesn't map cleanly enough to yours, and so where for a human you'd have some way to follow their thought patterns and identify mistakes, here the alien makes mistakes that don't add up.
Like the alien has encyclopedic knowledge of op codes in some esoteric soviet MCU but sometimes forgets how to look for a function definition, says "It looks like the read tool failed, that's ok, I can just make a mock implementation and comment out the test for now."
I have no strong idea why people can't accept that intelligence formed separately of a human brain can truly be alien: not in the hyperbolic sense of "that person is so unique it's like they're a different species", but "that thing does not have a brain, so it can have intelligence that is not human-like".
A human without a brain would die. An LLM doesn't have a brain and can do wonderous things.
It just does them in ways that require first accepting that there is no homo sapien thinks like an LLM.
We trained it on human language so often times it borrows our thought traces so to speak, but effective agentic systems form when you first erase your preconceived notions of how intelligence works and actually study this non-human intelligence and find new ways to apply it.
It's like the early days of agents when everyone thought if you just made an agent for each job role in a company and stuck them in a virtual office handing off work to each other it'd solve everything, but then Claude Code took off and showed that a simple brain dead loop could outperform that.
Now subagents almost always are task specific, not role specific.
I feel like we could leap ahead a decade if people could divorce "we use language, and it uses language so it is like us", but I think there's just something really challenging about that because it's never been true.
Nothing had this level of mastery over human language before that wasn't a human. And funnily enough, the first times we even came close (like Eliza) the same exact thing happened: so this seems like a persistent gap in how humans deal with non-humans using language.
I think these are reasonable questions but it assumes that everything is actually a black box instead of being treated as such.
Despite what the headlines say, these systems aren’t inscrutable.
We know how these things work and can build around and within and change parameters and activation functions etc…and actually use experience and science and guidance.
However those are not technical problems those are organizational social and quite frankly resource allocation problems.
I said the opposite of what your comment is replying to.
> but effective agentic systems form when you first erase your preconceived notions of how intelligence works and actually study this non-human intelligence and find new ways to apply it.
There's no reason you can't make good use of them and learn how to do it more reliably and predictably, it's just chasing those gains through a human intelligence-like model because they use human language leads to more false starts and local maxima than trying to understand stand them as their owb systems.
I don't think it should even be a particularly contentious point: we humans think differently based on the languages we learn and grew up with, what would you expect when you remove the entire common denominator of a human brain?
"I feel like we could leap ahead a decade if people could divorce "we use language, and it uses language so it is like us","
Or maybe just maybe... the thing should be much better designed around the human.
That's how personal computers made their way into homes. People like yourself are comical and can't understand how widespread adoption takes place to obtain value from what the thing intrinsically possesses.
Firms literally exist to take care of the hassle so that the person can get the value from the thing closer to the present - like hello...?
You quote me then start speaking about things completely unrelated to anything I said.
We can't choose if the LLM is like us unless you want to go back 10-20 years in time and choose a new direction for AI/ML.
We stumbled upon an architecture with mostly superficial similarities to how we think and learn, and instead focused on being able to throw more compute and more data at our models.
You're talking about ergonomics that exist at a completely different layer: even if you want to make LLM based products for humans, around humans, you have to accept it's not a human and it won't make mistakes like a human (even if the mistakes look human)
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If anything you're going to make something that burns most people if you just blindly pretend it's human-like: a great example being products that give users a false impression of LLM memory to hide the nitty gritty details.
In the early days ChatGPT would silently truncate the context window at some point and bullshit its way through recalling earlier parts of the conversation.
With compaction it does better, but still degrades noticeably.
If they'd exposed the concept of a context window to the user through top level primitives (like being able to manage what's important for example), maybe it'd have been a bit less clean of a product interface... but way more laypeople today would have a much better understanding of an LLM's very un-human equivalent to memory.
Instead we still give users lossy incomplete pictures of this all with the backends silently deciding when to compact and what information to discard. Most people using the tools don't know this because they're not being given an active role in the process.
Nope, I tried my best to be really detailed and already knew these replies would come flooding.
I'm an engineers engineer: I get the job isn't LOC but being able to communicate and translate meatspace into composable and robust sustems.
So when I mean an alien when I say an alien.
Not human.
Not in the cute "oh that guy just hears what everyone else hears and somehow interprets it entirely differently like he's from a different planet" alien way, but in the, "it is a different definition of intelligence derived from lacking wetware" alien way.
Intelligence is such multidimensional concept that all of humanity as varied as we are, can fit in a part of the space that has no overlap with an LLM.
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Now none of that is saying it can't be incredibly useful, but 99% of the misuse and misunderstanding of LLMs stems from humans refusing to internalize that a form of intelligence can exist that uses their language but doesn't occupy the same "space" of thinking that we all operate in, no matter how weird or unqiue we think we are.
Maybe it's just me, but isn't it exhausting that we have to do all kinds of work like a Shaman to combat the probabilistic nature of LLM, while knowing from the bottom of our heart that LLM can still screw up the code in the most creative way?
AI makes us believe that instead of working towards a goal, one can "win" that goal with a lucky prompt. AI replaces thinking with gambling, in other words, and it's very tempting to many.
> Believing we're in a climate crisis and also being anti-nuclear are mutually exclusive positions in my mind,
I wonder how many people actually believe that we are in good shape so mankind should have no development whatsoever. Just stay as is or even go back decades just to preserve the environment. The first world need more energy because we're greedy and etc.
I think the top three people who deserve the hate are Amodei, Hinton, and Joshua. They are the pioneers of the field, and they could have been more objective and laid out exactly where AI does well, where AI falls short, and how we can build a bright future. But oh, no! Instead, they keep telling people that AI will get us the doomsday. AI will displace half of jobs yesterday. AI will be so dangerous that only government can control it. AI will be so malicious that we should make sure AI say the right words in the right tone and give the "right" information. So, a fear monger, a commie, and a woke. It's not hard to imagine why that the public would turn against AI.
> With hard requirements listed, I found out that the generated code missed requirements,
This is hardly a surprise, no? No matter how much training we run, we are still producing a generative model. And a generative model doesn't understand your requirements and cross them off. It predicts the next most likely token from a given prompt. If the most statistically plausible way to finish a function looks like a version that ignores your third requirement, the model will happily follow through. There's really no rules in your requirements doc. They are just the conditional events X in a glorified P(Y|X). I'd venture to guess that sometimes missing a requirement may increase the probability of the generated tokens, so the model will happily allow the miss. Actually, "allow" is too strong a word. The model does not allow shit. It just generates.
But agents do keep task lists and check the tasks off as they go. Of course it’s not perfect either but it’s MUCH better than an LLM can offer on its own.
If you are seeing an agent missing tasks, work with it to write down the task list first and then hold it accountable to completing them all. A spec is not a plan.
bro do you really not understand that that's a game played for your sake - it checks boxes yes but you have no idea what effect the checking of the boxes actually has. like do you not realize/understand that anthropic/openai is baking this kind of stuff into models/UI/UX to give the sensation of rigor.
The checkboxes inform the model as well as the user, and you can observe this yourself. For example in a C++ project with MyClass defined in MyClass.cpp/h:
I ask the model to rename MyClass to MyNewClass. It will generate a checklist like:
- Rename references in all source files
- Rename source/header files
- Update build files to point at new source files
Then it will do those things in that order.
Now you can re-run it but inject the start of the model's response with the order changed in that list. It will follow the new order. The list plainly provides real information that influences future predictions and isn't just a facade for the user.
Are you seriously saying that breaking a large complex problem down into it's constituent steps, and then trying to solve each one of them as an individual problem is just a sensation of rigour?
I'm saying that's not what the stupid bot is actually doing, it's what anthropic added to the TUI to make you feel good in your feelies about what the bot is actually doing (spamming).
Edit: I'll give you another example that I realized because someone pointed it out here: when the stupid bot tells you why it fucked up, it doesn't actually understand anything about itself - it's just generating the most likely response given the enormous amount of pontification on the internet about this very subject...
I'm not disagreeing in principle, but the detritus left after an anthropic outage is usually quite usable in a completely fresh session. The amount of context pulled and stored in the sandbox is quite hefty.
Whist I can't usually start from the exact same point in the decisioning, I can usually bootstrap a new session. It's not all ephemeral.
To your edit: I find that the most galling thing about finding out about the thinking being discarded at cache clear.
Reconstruction of the logical route it took to get to the end state is just not the same as the step by step process it took in the first place, which again I feel counters your "feelies".
To some extent, I could agree with that idea. One purpose of that process is to match the impedance between the problem, and human cognition. But that presumes problem solving inherently requires human cognition, which is false; that's just the tool that we have for problem solving. When the problem-solving method matches the cognitive strengths and weaknesses of the problem solvers, they do have a certain sensation of having an upper hand over the problem. Part of that comes from the chunking/division allowing the problem solvers to more easily talk about the problem; have conversations and narratives around it. The ability to spin coherent narratives feels like rigor.
> On March 4, we changed Claude Code's default reasoning effort from high to medium to reduce the very long latency—enough to make the UI appear frozen—some users were seeing in high mode.
This sounds fishy. It's easy to show users that Claude is making progress by either printing the reasoning tokens or printing some kind of progress report. Besides, "very long" is such a weasel phrase.
Right a very simple UI thing that they should have that would have prevented so much misunderstanding. Is a simple counter. How much usage do a have i used and how much is left.
If a message will do a cache recreation the cost for that should be viewable.
Let's be honest, Meta over hired. Big time. If anyone ever interviewed a few Meta engineers, he would easily see that a large percentage of them had really small, and sometimes bullshit scopes. As a result, such engineers couldn't articulate what they do in Meta, couldn't deep dive into their own tech stacks, nor could solve common-sense design questions when they just deviated a bit from those popular interview questions. Many of those engineers were perfectly smart and capable. Meta have built so many amazing systems. So, the only explanation I can produce is that there's just too little work for too many people. I wouldn't be surprised if the ratio of meeting hours over coding hours per person went through the roof in the past few years in Meta.
I posted another comment about this, but I think that "overhiring" is actually the true answer, but it actually encompasses 2 separate phenomena:
1. Companies overhired during the pandemic because they thought we'd all want to be online only forever or something. I agree with you that a lot of that "hangover" has already been wrung out of the system.
2. The other issue, though, is that the ZIRP era lasted over a decade and ended in 2022. Companies pushed a ton of money into speculative projects that never went anywhere. Even when they were successful in terms of usage data, a lot of them never made any money (think Amazon's Alexa devices division - tons of people use Alexa, but they use it for like the same 5 or 6 basic tasks, as hardly anyone is doing lots of shopping over a voice interface, which is how Amazon thought they'd make money). The ZIRP era is over, so not only do these companies need to unwind these structural misallocations, but unless it's AI or AI-adjacent, there is 0 appetite for this kind of "let's just throw a lot of stuff at the wall and see what sticks" mentality.
Heck, Meta spent many billions on the Metaverse, and that went nowhere. Yes, they've had previous rounds of layoffs, but I don't think it's that surprising that it's taken multiple years for them to unwind that bet.
its not a 'concerted campaign'. meta laid off 4300 in 2025, but by the end of the year was actaully ~4800 higher than before. If that is not 'over hiring', i dont know what is. The headcount went from 74K in dec2024 to 78K in dec2025, even WITH the layoffs.
There is no "workforce reduction". its just "we need new faces around here". Hire-to-fire.
I think it is also a matter on how the Meta stock comp works - and that people hired during the slump in stock price became very expensive once it came back up.
It’s almost as if a group of 80,000 dynamic humans in a wild uncharted environment might mean decisions are made that have to be re-evaluated in a year!
They overhired, made a mess with people who are not very passionate. Then they fired but they fired all kinds, including some very good ones. Then they are still stuck in that loop and thinking AI is a solution to that
I can understand that, but when you have a dozen friends in these companies talking about how overstaffed they are and the whole "FAANG companies keep devs on payroll just so they can file 5k people to make investors happy" thing makes sense. None of these companies actually pause hiring when these layoffs happen, which is a major indicator of what's driving the layoffs. It's all artificial.
Name one product that Meta created over the last 10 years that mattered - beyond adtech. They can fire everyone in every team and just retain ads (tech and sales) - and some minimal setup for instagram and whatsapp and facebook and their revenue will not take a dent. So, yes, they overhired.
This comment put everything into perspective.
I can't name anything beyond Facebook, Instagram or Whatsapp that Meta's created and I've used in the past 10 years.
I've never even (knowingly) used the LLama models tbh.
If you consider Marketplace its own product it’s a massive win but they haven’t monetized it beyond some very ineffective post boosting and advertising. I honestly think they could charge 10% of list price for items over $50, plus membership levels that reduce or remove listing fees. and make a significant amount of money.
I use marketplace to search for cars, and the algorithm is beyond frustrating. I just want some decent filters. How a company that big can create something so terrible is beyond me.
Oddly enough - facebook groups are not terrible for very niche hobbies. Not sure what makes them attractive, but the groups are there. Thinking about it - there is really no alternative. My Retro Computing group is there, car owners group is there, very niche metal bands' posters group is there.
It is no doubt a campaign or at least a meme. It seems basically impossible for everyone to have overhired, for the simple reason that qualified workers do not appear and disappear from nowhere. There is a population of qualified workers in the software sector, and only new grads and retirement can move the needle significantly. So, if someone overhired then someone else must have done without, all things considered. The only ways out of the pool are basically retirement, career change, and death.
I know there are complications with this argument. For example, unemployment could double by basically doubling the average time to find a job. That kind of thing could support an overhiring thesis if the unemployment rate in tech got very low. To really test the "everybody overhired" thesis, I think you need to do a full accounting of early careers people, unemployed, retired, etc. I'm not gonna attempt that...
In my experience, this is not true. Demand for software engineers has been so high, and pay so high as a result, that it’s pulling in workers from adjacent industries. The total software-qualified workforce is larger than the set currently working in software, and people with transferrable skills move in and out of software as incentives dictate.
A number of my current and former coworkers are from math and physics backgrounds (CFD, energy, etc…). These are folks that before might have stayed in academia, or ended up in aerospace, defense, or other engineering fields.
If everyone over hired, demand drops, and companies drop pay as a result, I’m sure we’ll see some folks in software with transferrable skills move to other industries.
You may be right but it's not high pay alone that draws in people from other industries. Standards must be relaxed to accept people from unconventional backgrounds. When conditions tighten, many of these people are simply not competitive enough to get another job. When it comes to aerospace, defense, academia, etc., opportunities are more scarce in those fields than in software the past few years also. It is this, not just the pay, that drives people to software.
I'm not saying people with odd backgrounds can't ever make it. But let's be clear, these are not usually hot shots who can simply get any vaguely technical job they want. They get into software because it is traditionally very accepting of uncredentialled or non-mainstream individuals. The framing you put forward makes it sound like the people committed to software are chumps who have to take what they're given, and these interlopers are the real geniuses who leave for greener pastures with ease. That simply isn't true.
> "[…] and these interlopers are the real geniuses […]
This wasn’t the framing I was going for. My point was that industry boundaries are fluid and expand/contract as demand dictates. You’re correct that incentives are not all positive (pay, work life balance, perks), other industries contracting might force people to find work elsewhere.
All that said, I don’t think these people have “odd backgrounds”. I work in a math-heavy domain, so these backgrounds make as much sense as a traditional CS background, and I think these folks are just as likely to be retained in a crunch.
That depends very much on what kind of software you are writing and how good you are at it. I do not think math makes as much sense as CS for general software jobs. It might not count against you very much, but I wouldn't go so far as to say you're on the same footing as someone who dedicated their entire studies to CS. There are way worse backgrounds you could have besides math IMO. I would not want to be an English graduate who switched to software engineering. I've heard of some of those people.
Software engineering is unique among engineering fields in that it accepts people without the right credentials, and sometimes without any credentials. Other engineering fields not only require matching credentials but also have professional certifications. I don't think I would enjoy taking those very much, but after seeing some of the crap that people get away with I have fantasized about having such a process to filter people out.
> It seems basically impossible for everyone to have overhired, for the simple reason that qualified workers do not appear and disappear from nowhere. There is a population of qualified workers in the software sector, and only new grads and retirement can move the needle significantly.
SWEs (and most any role for that matter) definitely can be minted in ways besides graduating with a relevant major. On top of that there's also H1Bs and contractors. Plus "overhiring" doesn't necessarily just mean absolute headcount, it could be compensation, scope, middle managers, etc. The definition of "qualified" is also malleable depending on the incentives.
> So, if someone overhired then someone else must have done without, all things considered.
Beyond the previous points, this also assumes the supply of labor is independent of the demand, and it's clearly not. As the demand increases, so does compensation, outreach, advertising/propaganda, etc. Everybody can overhire simultaneously as a result of pushing for growth of the supply of labor.
We can both "yeah, but" this to death. You make some valid points but I think my observation generally holds. The supply of workers is not so elastic, at least if you have real standards for the workers such as college degrees and so on.
> There is a population of qualified workers in the software sector, and only new grads and retirement can move the needle significantly.
“Qualified” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Just like the first dotcom boom and crash, there were people in other fields who got into software during the boom time and went back to whatever other field after the crash.
Also there isn't one profile of software developers.
At least 3 tiers: the FAANG level, the mid-size tech companies, then all the developers working for non-tech companies/administration or in IT service companies.
Even in those categories, workers aren't swappables.
If they're not swappable, that supports my claim about scarcity even more. But I also have people here saying that you can swap in anybody vaguely technical, sometimes without credentials at all, to fill these roles even at FAANG.
I happen to think workers with minimum qualifications like a CS degree can be fairly swappable, at least more than FAANG types would have us believe. But they're very elitist when it comes to hiring. I have practically given up on being hired at FAANG companies, and these days I think their jobs are overrated too. Sign up to bust your ass 50 hours per week with backstabbing snobs, till you get laid off unceremoniously. I'd rather not.
> It seems basically impossible for everyone to have overhired, for the simple reason that qualified workers do not appear and disappear from nowhere.
Not everyone, but it go through the roof, or at least it did in my country. I know a lot of people who doubled or even tripled their salary during that time as these companies went absolutely ape shit. They were getting 50k increases with each position change. I've not seen anything like it before, and I honestly wonder if i'll ever see anything like it again. Kinda wish i'd been in the job market at the time, but I was off with health issues sadly so missed that boom.
> So, if someone overhired then someone else must have done without, all things considered.
They did? Again, at least in my country. Smaller shops felt the pain, as tons of people left for the pastures of big tech.
> Small businesses have been identified as the biggest losers of the 2020–2022 explosion in big tech hiring. While demand for digital transformation grew to previously unseen levels, smaller firms and businesses were severely disadvantaged by intense competition from large companies for talent, resulting in a multi-year skills shortage where less than 50% of small business vacancies were filled, compared to 65% for large firms
Overhired has nothing to do with the talent pool and just means they hired more than they actually needed or wanted, if the talent pool is large enough then everyone can overhire
Of course the judgement about whether people overhired is subjective on a per-company basis. My point is, you can't hire people who don't exist, and the ways to get people into the industry are limited. All other things equal, we would expect massive overhiring to be matched with very low unemployment in the industry, and the correction should not go below some baseline.
Meta has about 10% more employees now than they did at the end of 2021. They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft. If you're right, the rest of big tech is in a much worse position.
Yeah, but, just objectively speaking, look at how many _more_ business lines and units and actual PRODUCTS each of those other companies ship in comparison.
Meta has... Facebook. Instagram. Threads, if you want to count it. What'sApp. The ad-tech that powers those things. A black hole of a VR division that has since been eviscerated after billions burned. An AR/device divison that sells glasses. And a burgeoning supernova of an AI division, just one singular hire of which is responsible for $1.5B in pay (over 6 years).
Google/Alphabet has........ an entire consumer hardware family ranging from cameras to doorbells to smart displays to streamers, YouTube, YouTubeTV, Android, Chrome, Google itself, Gemini, GCP, Waymo, GoogleFi, Google Fiber, Ads, Infra/Analytics, Maps, dozens of other apps... on and on.
Microsoft has Azure, Windows, Office (each of which are obviously _suites_ of more complex software), Xbox, LinkedIn, Dynamics, Surface, etc.
If anything, Apple _might_ be a slightly closer analog to Meta in that they're just a bit more limited, but their hardware engineering side is obviously a massive part of that, supply chain, software, MacOS, iOS, all of their adjacent first-party apps, App Store, iCloud, AppleTV, retail...
Meta just... isn't in the same league in terms of pure surface area. Mark just leaned extremely hard into acquiring as much nascent talent as possible and hoped he'd have the use cases to make it make sense but was content to spend the money in the meantime on looking busy. Now that CapEx has to go to compute/DCs/GWs for their AI which... kind of no one wants? But he's going to bet as much of the company as possible to stay relevant and try to be a player in the space. He's just doing it in this tail-wagging-the-dog hyper-overpay-individual-researchers approach that, from the outside at least, seems extremely risky...
I am convinced Mark Zuckerberg does more harm than good for Facebook
like literally they lucked out on the landing the business model early but it feels it has been in an ongoing decline and everything else they have tried has failed spectacularly (and particularly things Mark has put his whole weight behind)
They never became anything more than the ad company
Pretty sure they bought Insta and Whatsapp. I mean, that's not nothing, buying a successful business and keeping it successful for over a decade. But neither Zuck nor Meta made those platforms; they were both established successes in their own right before acquisition.
The "amazing acquisitions" should be antitrust. Whatsapp is a non starter given what Brian Acton reported. I'll never use it. People widely report they ruined Instagram and Zuck came back furiously explaining in an email chain later "oh sorry I didn't mean to say we're killing the competition" probably after a lawyer scolded him
I feel like you just cherry picked from my examples. YouTube was certainly successful - Google bought them because their own Google Video competitor was a flop. DoubleClick was also obviously huge. Where 2 had a successful product, it just wasn't web based (nor do I think free), so didn't have anywhere near the distribution that Google enabled once the team ported it to run in a browser.
I think there is a difference in at least degree here (maybe in kind, idk) that's lost by lumping them purely on acquisition or not, but I do largely agree with your point.
But just wanted to correct for the historical record:
> Where 2 had a successful product, it just wasn't web based (nor do I think free), so didn't have anywhere near the distribution that Google enabled once the team ported it to run in a browser.
Where 2 did not have a product, successful or not. They were an unreleased demo looking for investors and luckily got into a room with Larry Page of 2004.
Indeed, I think they used bad examples as neither Android or Where 2 were successful, but it also shows that Google has done a mix of buying something successful to fill a gap or find someone with a good tech that they help to get over the line and make successful.
I’m sure the others saw the value too. It just wasn’t worth as much to them as Zuckerberg was prepared to pay. Not surprising given it’s a service that directly competed with FB in the social space.
Probably because Instagram wasn't a direct competitor to any of those other companies (except maybe Google+, which wasn't even a year old at the time that FB bought Instagram). I don't know why softbank didn't get them.
Instagram had around 10mn users at acquisition, so they might not have gotten to where they are without FB. Whatsapp was a successful product that didn't make any money.
One step further. Besides Facebook itself whqt has zuck been visionary about ? Instw and WhatsApp was bought. He thought chatbots was the thing in ‘17, then abandoned it for VR and metaverse, all the while chatbots start taking off. Every time he’s in an interview he talks like he’s some savant, really he got lucky with fb and done nothing since
The continual success of fb and instagram has not come from zuck but through glorified A/B testing on steroids whilst lighting employee’s asses on fire each quarter to move the metrics. Visionary genius? My ass. Only Steve Jobs proved he is worthy of that title.
Bro is a fraud. He always was - remember he stole the idea for fb. Thankfully he’s getting found out.
i argue that most ideas aren't necessary novel, so stealing idea isn't necessary bad.... e.g. i don't think google search was entirely novel, but was well executed.
honestly - meta has built quite a lot of cool things, but c-suite is probably to be blamed for what's going on today.
No the strategy of having a professional looking social space in the web, specifically focused on college folks solely was novel - this is what he stole and without this it wouldn’t have gotten to the place of success it is today. Knowing about the technology is no good without a solid strategy - with a solid strategy anyone can raise the funding to go build it. It’s easy to know what to build when you have a vision specifically of what you’re building into.
was it actually? I don't know the full technical behind this but wiki does suggest: "A search engine called "RankDex" from IDD Information Services, designed by Robin Li in 1996, developed a strategy for site-scoring and page-ranking.."
If he didn’t steal anything why did winklevoss and another person at Harvard involved in the original project get a pay off…?
Do we really need to discuss this? He tried to screw another founder - the Brazilian - who got a pay off and now has a reported net worth in the billions.
Meta profits are good but they’re closing in on the $100 billion dollar mark in their Meta Quest/AI fiasco just because you can afford it doesn’t mean you should do it. See another company called Oracle for a similar path.
Besides selling democracy for pennies on the dollar, Zuckerberg knew what to buy before everyone else knew what it was worth.
In 2012, everyone around me was lauging at the absurdity of a 0 revenue photo app getting acquired for $1bn. My peers/superiors in the ad business thought Facebook would flail in digital marketing. Oops.
The metaverse might be a big pile of bollocks, but isn't the whole point of being a billionaire to indulge peculiar unpopular obsessions?
No he bought everything out of paranoia to shut out competition.
They tried organically to replicate instagram etc but they failed even though they had wayyyy more resources. Their attempts sucked. So their approach was to target for acquisition or copy features if they couldn’t.
There’s plenty of evidence of this re. His comms around those events.
Zuckerberg copied Snapchat like... 5 times at least? It should have signified to EVERYBODY he has sociopath-like behavior (in fact apparently on the Zuckerberg-owned Instagram, Snapchat content got demoted, or something) and how he is absolutely the same person that was willing to fuck the Winklevosses ("in the ear")
But I suppose that doesn't count because Winklevii "never would have come up with anything anyway"
> Social media is an extremely competitive landscape, with competitors rising overnight.
This is not true at all. There are two players. FB/Instagram and TikTok. Using one does not preclude using the other. Other than tiktok, who was the last new player in social?
> Google, Apple and Microsoft dominate the world with their products and platforms. Facebook & WhatsApp certainly doesnt.
There are all kinds of social media, its segmented by userbase, and culture/geography.
Telegram has 1B users (which is surprising to me, I thought it was an ex-Soviet thing), and there are entire geographic strongholds, such as Russia and China.
Russia and China still use iPhones and Windows, but entirely skipped out on Facebook and Whatsapp.
> There are all kinds of social media, its segmented by userbase, and culture/geography.
Your own link has Meta with 3 of the top 4 platforms. Can you really see any of the competitors overtaking them in even the medium term?
> Russia and China still use iPhones and Windows, but entirely skipped out on Facebook and Whatsapp.
China doesn't use Google either, and while they might use Windows they're staying off Azure which is where Microsoft's main business is these days.
Yes there are countries which stay off Meta. But they are just as embedded in the workings of the world as any of the companies you mentioned, probably more so. Government decisions are made by people using a mix of Apple, Google and Microsoft hardware - but all of them are communicating over WhatsApp.
And for all the scorn it gets on HN, Facebook still works for some of my use cases: high school friends, low-contact relatives, obscure geography groups, the Philippines.
> Heck, if I was forced to either short or invest Meta with all my retirement savings now betting on it's value in 25 years.. I'd short it.
Short of social media being classified as something like alcohol or cigarettes, you will lose money on this trade. You’re betting against ingrained human nature.
And an entire desktop OS and desktop software suite in pretty much all categories to compete with Microsoft. Also their hardware business is roughly 50-100X the size of Google's hardware business in scale and distribution.
The headcount analog for Google is Apple. And if you subtract out the retail employees Apple looks surprisingly efficient, having much less non-retail staff than Google (although both heavily use contractors).
Meta on the other hand...is pretty much the definition of bloat.
It's been more than a few years since I worked at Apple, but they were always unique in the tech space in that their retail division dwarfed headcount. If I recall correctly all of OS X Lion was produced by around 3,000 engineers (and probably less, since I think that count included iLife and iWork).
> And an entire desktop OS and desktop software suite in pretty much all categories to compete with Microsoft.
Not even close, if you include Office and Mail/Outlook. And if you include corporate clients, Apple is just not on the map. I've gone from a Windows first company to an Apple first company, and it's a night and day difference when you see how well integrated things were for Windows.
I mean, individually you can say Teams sucks (terrible, really). And Outlook sucks as a consumer. But the way you can get all these things working with Office was very convenient.
Meta has Facebook which was OG enough. MySpace was the real movement although you could argue LiveJournal was before that. Instagram was bought, WhatsApp was too. So really all Meta has is Facebook, everything else has been synergy.
Apple / Google and as I hate to admit are innovators of the modern tech world. While they've bought their fair-share they still produce and create and have existed prior 00's. Two devices dominate the market and it's not going to change any time soon.
You either use iOS or Google. Urgh, this is how the world has become. Windows or Linux, X or Y; why did Z have to die.
Yep - It's nearly impossible to assign profit to those things - we have X revenue from Android licenses, what's the cost of an android license? Is it all the R&D that goes to UI or hardware research? What's the cost of a Youtube Ad?
Google makes money on ads, because its products span the entire internet.
Youtube, Gmail, Search, Maps, Android, Devices, Photos and Drive are how they get the data to make money on ads. Cloud, Android & Youtube would be a 2 trillion dollar company even without Google. They don't make money on these, because they don't need to make money on it.
Apple makes cutting edge hardware, at least two operating systems and lots of user applications. Google makes search, cloud, a decent office suite with the largest mail server in the world and of course cutting edge AI. It's easy to see why either of them needs twice as many people as Meta
That’s like saying email powers entire economies. It’s not WhatsApp that’s providing the value there, and if they press to hard to try and pull revenue from it, all that communication would flow into another channel.
WhatsApp is one of the buggiest UIs I use daily. Random things like images/messages stacking on top of each other, seeing the HD and low definition videos as two separate things in favorites, never being able to view the HD one, sometimes the messages never scrolling quite to the bottom, just amateur level stuff, I'm a bit impressed with how bad it is.
Google and Microsoft have significantly more products. That's even just counting their consumer products, their cloud providers are a whole other kettle of fish.
I would expect a company that makes some web pages to have less than half the people than:
- a company that makes the leading search engine, the leading browser, one of the two major mobile OSes, one of the major desktop OSes, some of the best ai hardware, and is in the running to win the ai race
- a company that makes the leading mobile and desktop OSes and the leading desktop and os hardware, one of the top consumer cloud offerings, a major online media store, and a popular consumer electronics retail store
Think about the scope of Apple's business (Hardware, Processors, Operating Systems, Software competitors for every app category, Physical Retail, Global Ecommerce, Global distribution networks, App stores, Payments, Credit cards, Banking, Music streaming, Film/TV studio, etc).
Now compare it to Meta, a company where the vast majority of revenue is essentially a few mobile apps with an advertising network. No operating systems, no processor design, and a few hardware boondoggles only 1/10000th the scale of Apple's, etc.
Now realize that, if you subtract out Apple's retail employees, they have roughly similar headcount to Meta.
Now tell me again that Apple is in a "worse" position than Meta on efficiency.
Meta bought Rivos, and as far as I can see do a ton of work related to Linux kernel stuff (I heard about this in the context of eBPF). But datacenter side, not consumer.
about half (80k) of the equivalent fulltime employees at Apple are involved in the store footprint, so they're retail staff in one of their main sales channels.
And as other's have pointed out, Apple has a far wider range of products and services than Meta, and produce far more hardware products, including their own cutting-edge SOC's. Meta, meanwhile, get Broadcom to largely produce their "custom ASIC's", not just fab, but deeply involved in design, tape out, and validation.
> They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft.
Meta is the youngest company of that group. Apple and Microsoft have been around for over twice as long.
Meta also has the narrowest scope of those companies.
Really it's kind of amazing that Meta has so many employees relative to those other companies given how much narrower their business is. Puts the overhiring into perspective.
Not familiar with Microsoft. But it's definitely amazing that Google managed to grow itself to one of the most bureaucratic companies in the past 15 years. And yeah, it's bloated as hell.
choosing 2021 is itself a really odd cutoff date to choose. The really bizarre hiring happened between 2016 and 2021 https://i.redd.it/c94hnp9kvzy91.png
They had 17k employees in 2016 and 80k in 2022. And given that a lot of the big tech companies looked like this albeit not quite so extreme I think it's right to say they might all have a glut of employees.
Both Google and Microsoft are bigger, and with more products than Meta.
But both Google and Microsoft also massively overhired around the same timeframe as Meta, and are still digging themselves out of the mess of their own making. And making their teams pay for such stupidity.
Not Apple, but if you see Apple join the layoff party, then you know things are really bad, however Google and Microsoft like Meta seem to go through this every five or six years.
>Meta has about 10% more employees now than they did at the end of 2021.
So? They likely already had too many in 2021.
>They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft.
Technology (hw/sw) wise, they also have 1/10 the internal tech and public product breadth and scope of Google or Apple and Microsoft. Maybe 1/50 even. They do like 4-5 social media and chat apps (that they hardly ever update anymore), and some crappy VR stuff nobody cares for.
This is actually a false premise pushed later to justify layoffs. They started overhiring in 2018-2019. They just continued a preexisting trend through 2021.
Are these meta engineers that were let go? The one thing you learn more than anything else as a Meta engineer is how to sell your work and how amazing it is
I interviewed someone recently who worked at Meta a couple years ago. He was a software engineer, was paid a bunch of money to mostly up dashboards all day, and eventually quit because it was neither interesting nor challenging.
As someone who has worked at big tech (and interviewed fellow big tech workers), I can confirm this is pretty typical.
People from Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, etc...it's all the same. Given the size of these organizations (anywhere from 100K-300K employees if you include contractors), there's a vanishingly small chance the individual you're interviewing had influence or responsibility over any important thing specifically. And if they were high enough on the org chart to be responsible for something real, they weren't ever hands on and just played politics all day in meetings.
Everyone will claim otherwise of course, but its all layers and layers of diffusion of responsibility.
The pace of work inside these orgs is, meet for months about a narrowly scoped new feature (eg. "add a 5th confusing toolbar to Gmail to market Google's 7th video call tool"), take months to build it and run it up the organizational gauntlet for approval, launch it and then chill for 3 months because nobody does anything big in Q4.
For many people at these orgs this is what an entire year of "work" can look like, for which they will be paid roughly $400k.
While at G I was one of three engineers working on a mid-sized iOS app. We shared ownership of the entirety of the codebase. It wasn't dissimilar to some of the other teams I've worked on at orgs of differing sizes.
> The pace of work inside these orgs is, meet for months about a narrowly scoped new feature, take months to build it and run it up the organizational ladder for approval, launch it and then chill for 3 months because nobody does anything big in Q4.
This sounds wonderful, it certainly wasn't the case for us.
I've contracted at several big tech companies and that other commenter is making stuff up. My experience was similar to yours, the engineers were very productive on impactful projects. I'm sure there is some dead weight in every company, but it's the exception not the norm.
It sounds like you have financial incentives motivating your desire to shape opinions on this issue. I already exited big tech so I'm able to be candid. But don't worry, giant companies aren't going to stop your gravy train, they already know you're not highly "productive" and "impactful." That's the point.
If you were actually important to the organization it would be a terrible mismanagement of the company. A well-run big org is designed such that workers are replaceable cogs in generalized salary bands, that's what makes the machine durable.
It's very easy to think you're "productive" and "busy" when your days are filled with meetings and trying to placate various groups of stakeholders. But if you look at your actual work output after a year in big tech, it's fundamentally low impact, and it's that way by design.
> it's fundamentally low impact, and it's that way by design.
I'd like to keep tugging on this thread, I find it interesting.
In my experience, everyone up my chain of command was motivated to derive as much impact from their reports as they possibly could. If anything, it felt as if the system was designed to reward impact above all else - promotions were given to engineers who could demonstrate their work on _____ increased _____ by x% driving revenue by y%.
Nowhere in the system seemed designed to reward low impact, it really felt the opposite.
When you were at a big tech co, your experience was different?
> People from Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, etc...it's all the same.
Hmm...it's been a while, but when I was at Apple one of the reasons given internally for why products were so much better than the competition (and they were) was that Apple typically had 1/10th the number of people working on a particular product or feature.
But Apple is still amazingly efficient compared to others like Meta/Microsoft/etc if you just look at raw headcount vs. product/service/distribution surface area.
Who is more impactful, the startup engineer who singlehandedly ships a feature that increases a startup revenue by 25% off a base $5M/yr ($1M extra rev), or a Meta/Google team of 5 engineers who ship a .01% revenue improve off a base of 150B/yr (15M/5 = $3M/engineer).
As an engineer you are thinking about impact as 'scope' or 'features'. Leadership will be thinking marginally on what adding a net new engineer will provide to the business.
“Marginalism is the economic doctrine that we can best understand value by considering the question of how many units of a good or service an individual has, and using that starting point to ask how much an additional – or marginal – unit would be worth in terms of other goods and services.”
If some engineer optimizes something in the Google search stack that makes it, on average, just 0.01% faster (not 1%, but one-one-hundredth of a percent), then they have paid their salary for the entire year. Almost in perpetuity. No matter what level they are.
Very small gains multiplied out over extremely large amounts of compute over large amounts of time add up big.
And that's why Google can spend so much money on fairly small scoped teams.
A lot of rationalization for what is fundamentally just market inefficiency: economies of scale and network effects (aka Monopoly).
Remove Google's monopoly level distribution, and then build that feature and tell me how much revenue it generates.
The value is in the monopoly which was formed by the founders and all the early employees by having the right products at the right time decades ago, not in the "upgrade now" button some worker bee added to Gmail in year 25 of the company.
Yes, that "upgrade now" button probably does generate $100M in revenue per year. But the reason why isn't because of some unique engineering talent on behalf of the worker bee.
They just pay that dude so much because activist investors don't scrutinize costs too aggressively on growing monopolies (wait until revenue growth stops) and they value stability. If you don't value stability to the same degree (you aren't a massive 200K employee org), I wouldn't hire the "upgrade now" button guy.
My famous interview question: "How do you copy a file to another computer?", I was told I need to tone down. It filters out too many entry/mid level candidates.
Given how inefficient Meta et al are, why do the pay so much more than the nimbler smaller companies? (Rhetorical question, I already know the answer: monopoly and regulatory capture)
Of course those engineers would rather have more meaningful work if it came with similar compensation and work life balance.
I am a terrible person to ask. My employers get their money's worth from me: I genuinely like my work and regularly work more than 8hrs a day. I also work in a field with others who, with some exception, do the same, so its strange for me to see "normal people" clock out on the dot.
Meta offices are pretty full at 5pm lmao. In fact they are still decently full at 7pm after dinner at 6. Baffles me why people just make up random crap in areas they clearly know less than nothing about.
This is my experience too. I actually briefly took the cool exciting climate change related science job and then realized that I couldn’t actually support my family’s lifestyle on $160k so I left and went back to surveillance capitalism. I do feel guilt about that decision, but I like to imagine I’ll be able to go back to working on interesting and ethical things after my kids are out of the house.
For big products with many years of history behind them, yeah, that's true. For v. 1.0 or skunkworks projects, it's still mostly true but occasionally, some crazy-ass stuff can happen. (Cue the "what has seen cannot be unseen" meme pic.)
If I had to guess, the main reason you don’t hire big tech employees is because you can’t afford to. Everything else is extremely subjective depending on what area said engineer worked.
I interviewed a Meta Senior SWE in 2023. Guy couldn't write the most basic Python loop. Attempts were made. I didn't expect a list comprehension. This was just a warmup exercise fizz-buzz level so everyone can feel confident and talk. Everyone just smashes it. I could have done it as a teenager. Had to call it off after 15 min of trying. It was too much. But he took it on the chin. "Yep, thanks, sorry I didn't get too far. Bad day, maybe" or something like that. Most confident guy I've ever talked to. I was impressed by that - to totally bomb and be cool about it. Good for him.
The 3-year old anecdote is a bit pointless. It literally could have been a bad day. I've burnt myself out on a problem the night before and absolutely bombed simple interview questions, too. Or it just happened to be the least competent engineer at Meta. It doesn't give much information on their average employee, though
We had the same experience with Meta engineers. One candidate had been with Meta/Facebook for seven years and had nothing to show for it. They had an incredibly hard time articulating what work they actually did. It was something related to storage, but pretty much every answer was "well, actually someone else does that part". Also same experience with basic coding, no actual skills, yet somehow manages to have a CS degree.
Someone has to be doing the actual work at Meta, but that might not be the people who are seeking out new jobs. So we get this false impression that their engineers are a bit... not good, because those are the ones actually leaving.
it stems from an abundance of ineffective and abysmal leadership, where someone finds themselves in a position of importance and the only thing they know how to do is hire subordinates to blame or rely on. Those subordinates need headcount, and so it goes all the way down to bloated teams of ICs.
some people call it empire building, but it’s really just incompetence.
I believe you, but that doesn't mean the comment you're responding to is wrong. Large layoffs are like trying to doing surgery with a butcher knife while wearing an eye patch and a pair of mittens.
Since companies usually don't want to telegraph the layoffs too far in advance, they try and keep the people in the know as small as possible. That means the people making the decisions on who stays and who goes are often multiple levels removed from a lot of the people affected.
I'm really sorry to hear that you got let go and I hope you are able to find a new role soon.
Pretty much. In a prior role I didn't have a real job any longer but the people making the decisions for a fairly small layoff probably didn't know that. Would have been happy to have taken a decent severance package. Hung out for a while more or less.
I thought it's also mostly to preserve feeling, to obscure the connection between performance and layoff to ease employee transition to another job. That's why sometimes it's a branch all at once from the middle to bottom.
You no who I am ( meta )it me .0. I'm coming to see u meta u killed and hurt to many people. Wear are the children. Kids..... You know who I'm talking about this is holly war people humans you know as well. This is not your world 2010 to 2025 it's human world
Presumably meta will always need engineers. Why fire staff who have meta experience and inevitably have to hire more engineers probably in some weeks or days? Engineers who will need onboarding and might not turn out too.
Your computer is the problem meta to many dead people that why computers are fucking up..your programs are tanted and bad programing formula bads. Your killing people
This is exactly right and I've got to wonder what the AI conversation would be like in the alternate timeline where tech didn't massively overhire in the wake of Covid.
I wonder if the facebook redesign also sucked a lot of manual labor and it is now mostly done so they don't need so many people anymore to maintain that product.
Strongly held but apparently not popular opinion: candidates should not be expected, and should refuse, to discuss confidential internals of their former employers.
There's no need to ask about anything confidential. Meta published a lot about their internal tech stacks, and they use plenty of open-source stuff. ZippyDB, Interview candidate can also talk about generic stuff, and I can drill on the theory or common practice.
What is confidential, exactly? I once had a contract that said that I cannot discuss any technology I used for two years after the contract ends. _Any technology_. So, git. And Postgres and so on.
It's completely normal in tech circles to talk about technology.
I think he's saying that during interviews the candidates were being asked to dive deep into their preceding employers' tech stacks. Which does seem to be asking them to tread in dicey legal waters in a coercive situation.
I see. Always stuggled with this. I think design interview on hypotheticals is better. Or have you used X with follow up questions about X? Probably OK to say we used kubetnetes. But not OK to describe inner workings of a custom controller that speeds up their workloads even if candidate wrote the code.
Well, if that's the case, it's time to hold leadership accountable, because they recklessly spent company money on hiring people who did not create value for the shareholders.
Mark Zuckerberg ultimately approved that hiring initiative, right? He's the CEO; either he approved it or he approved of the hiring of the person that handled it and likely delegated the task to that person.
Mark needs to be shown the door.
Oh wait.
Mark's on the board.
And he has majority voting power.
... I'm starting to think there might be difficulty in holding him accountable.
The problem isn't when he might have gotten it, it's that he could have it to begin with.
The real issue is that our systems allow for one person to effectively control hundreds of billions of dollars of capital with absolutely no one to provide any consequences if they make bad decisions with that capital.
If we really are setting this up as a for-profit, publicly-traded company, how does that system of corporate governance enforce any sort of way to make sure that Zuckerberg's ego doesn't get in the way of doing things right? Basically right now it's a sole proprietorship with window dressing.
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