'It's Literally the Gulag': Furious Meta Employees Speak Out on 'Soul-Crushing' AI Jobs
2d 6h ago by discuss.online/u/VetOfTheSeas in workreform from www.ibtimes.co.uk
Yeah. They can find another job. Though not with us. We don't hire ex Meta employees. You have to be pretty fucked up to accept working there in the first place.
When did you guys make that decision? Was there a particular evil action or the combination of all.
Idk if they were evil by 2010, but certainly by 2015 they were.
After losing hours interviewing some of them back in the days and realizing they were not software engineers, but facebook engineers, completly lost with anything else. It's even worse with ex Google employees.
Some of them are probably very capable, but as for those, well, they pay the price of their past decisions. Been like that for at least 10y by now.
Yeah, some engineers who work for very large companies basically become type cast. Can't do anything other than pull this lever, watch this knob and mark this on excel. It doesn't matter if they graduated from Netflix academy or have a highschool degree or got trained at big co, those skills are not engineering.
Honestly, I’m glad I didn’t get sucked into the big tech vortex a decade or so ago. Much happier working in biotech these days.
What are you doing? I'm with scverse, doing single cell stuff.
Oncological genomic sequencing cross-correlated with clinical patient outcome data to improve cancer treatment targeting based on real world patient outcome data. Personally, I work on data pipeline stuff. The mission is fantastic; the management and C-suites are a massive pain in my ass. But when are they not?
I hope pipeline stuff is better than when I started. I (not so) accidentally played a big part in revolutionizing my field by building anndata and scanpy. Then I tried doing it again by writing sequencing stuff in Rust, but was too early / too bad, but now that's happening too!
I’m personally playing with the idea of putting together a POC to transition our “foundation” data warehouse from PSQL to a graphDB, because the extensibility and maintainability of our current system is fucking awful. Like, some upstream entity gets a version bump and there’s like 5 systems we have to go through and add columns to various tables (usually 2-4 such modifications in each workflow - and it doesn’t help how my manager fucking loves to slice work up so much that it becomes a massive pain to integrate, instead of telling one Eng “integrate this new data element” and have it done, soup to nuts, in a week or two across the whole ecosystem) and occasionally fuck around with joins and so on every single time there’s a new piece of data we want to integrate. And we have no capability to scan back historically and evaluate our holistic state at some particular time index, which can be really helpful for some applications.
Anyways, I’m fucking swamped at work so haven’t touched that at all, but I’ve wanted to explore that idea for well over a year and a half at this point.
I have little experience with graphdb, but a lot of experience with the pain you're describing. Maintaining schemas is a pain, maybe if you don't need the performance, you can go that route!
The thing that interests me about it is that it will be a lot more trivially interrogable by ML stuff (bespoke ML specifically, not LLM), which could glean an absolute shitload of interesting insights for us.
I am an enormous fucking Luddite for a whole swath of reasons when it comes to LLMs, but ML outside of that context can be immensity powerful when employed correctly.
For sure, my lab has been doing that for a long time.
How is graphdb more ML-friendly?
If you’re doing PSQL (or any typical relational DB flavor), there’s a lot more complexity in terms of understanding the shape of the data, what joins to what, how to optimize queries, etc. Graph DBs are gonna be easier for a model to explore, since they can just do stuff like “I want to see tests with samples that have reactivity to mutation ABC on chromosome 14 over a threshold of X”, which is a lot easier for an ML agent (or less experienced developer, or even a molecular biologist with limited CS/DB experience) to just intuitively evaluate correctly using the syntax of GraphQL than it would be trying to do a shitload of joins between 6 or 7 tables in PSQL.
I agree, I left software dev 10 years ago. The previous 3 decades were a golden age - we went from working with wild-west code and flat files to modular programming and databases, then object-oriented programming, then the web came along and brought another wild-west period, then came millions of packages and frameworks du jour. A giant wave of all that was just curling overhead when I left, but hadn't crashed down yet. Now if your web page with a button on it doesn't use 47 libraries you're not a software engineer lol.
So agism fears xcept accelerated to be 25 year olds instead of 55 years olds...?
You know what? I am okay with this.
They low key deserved it after this leet code tests.
Interesting and seems about right. I’m kinda surprised that the skills don’t transfer, but the culture sure would. I wouldn’t wand FB or G culture in my office. Eww
LOL, I once met a manager who said he wouldn't even interview devs with multiple years of Amazon on their resumes. He believed it was such a siloed organization it ruined people's ability to cooperate, and he didn't want to have to decondition that out of them.
"team events"
That will sure make a perfect workplace.
Here's the original Wired article without as much neoliberal spin: https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-meta-employee-meeting-interrupt-ai/
In other news, furious Meta employees think "literal" means "virtual".
How much do they get paid?
Is this a rest and vest type of thing while the rest of the world has to actually work for a wage? All while they contribute, if even passively, to one of the worst corporations to ever exist?
It sounds like you’re whining about individuals’ rights while ignoring that you’re a member of the klan or something…