[ericlippert]

I see your point and don't mean to be argumentative, but a couple small corrections.

First, the pivot to "meta" was just over a year ago, so it hasn't been quite years.

Second, I haven't been shy about sharing my opinion internally, though I haven't been broadcasting it either. The first thing I said in our team group chat when we'd heard this announcement was (context, I am much older than most people on the team) "I'm old enough to have read Snow Crash the week it came out and IT WAS A DYSTOPIA, why are we building it?"

Third, this opinion is indeed extremely common internally.

Fourth, I genuinely have no idea how this decision was made; it was certainly not on the basis of net cost savings. We did the math.

[kelnos]

> Third, this opinion is indeed extremely common internally.

It is intensely weird to me that people hold the opinion that their company is building something that is bad for the world, and yet they stay there and continue to help build it.

I know that's easy to say as someone not in that situation, but not always easy to do for someone who is. I get that people don't always have a ton of choice about their employment; maybe they are afraid of losing their health insurance, maybe they are on a visa and can't easily switch jobs, or maybe they simply aren't able to find another job that works for them. Less noble, but maybe the pay is just too good, and if they stay for just a bit longer, it will be life changing. I can totally sympathize with that!

But if this opinion is "extremely common", I would expect that a good number of those people would have the ability to leave, to the point that perhaps Zuckerberg would rethink his strategy.

(I don't really buy the "change things from within" explanation; 1) that rarely works, especially in a company the size of Meta, and 2) if tried, that clearly has not worked, given Meta's continuing trajectory.)

[ericlippert]

People are leaving. In droves. There has been a huge exodus of senior talent in the last year. Zuck mentioned that in an earnings call and rather than assigning himself any responsibility said that those people were unregretted attrition and lazy parasites who were just collecting a paycheck during the pandemic. (I am paraphrasing somewhat; you can look it up if you want his exact words.)

Regarding change from within -- that's what a team dedicated to improving decision making is for.

[brazzledazzle]

Why would he ever consider taking responsibility for something when he can't really be held accountable? It should be illegal to take a company public with special voting-only shares.

[killingtime74]

It is illegal on some stock exchanges. You are free to only buy your shares there. Also you are free to buy stocks on exchanges that do allow it but don't have two classes. No one is forcing anyone to buy Meta

[minitoar]

Sorta. Meta is a component of the sp500. It’s pretty difficult to avoid buying that.

[akiselev]

Just go beat the market.

[concordDance]

Buy shares of the other 499?

[rekabis]

> Zuck mentioned that in an earnings call and rather than assigning himself any responsibility said that those people were unregretted attrition and lazy parasites who were just collecting a paycheck during the pandemic.

Wow. What an effective way of encouraging others to leave while discouraging others from applying.

Remember: toxic work environments are reinforced from the top, and the top _only._ Toxic leadership begets toxic work environments, and it looks like Zuck is a right peach in being insufferably toxic.

[alisonatwork]

I've often wondered this, especially when I quit a company out of principle, expecting that I wouldn't be the only one. But even when an entire department quits en masse, it turns out that none of us are ever as important as we thought we were. The guys on the top who make the real decisions are on the top because they are experts at driving their vision forward regardless of whatever happens underneath or around them. They might make pretenses toward being servant leaders or listening to upward feedback, but the reality is if they have convinced enough investors or board members to back them, or if they independently own a majority stake, they can and will do whatever they like. The rank and file employees do not matter.

I think most workers have accepted this reality. Workplaces are not a democracy. Even if most of the workforce disagrees with a policy that was approved from on high, there is little they can do to change it. Especially in the tech industry, where jobs are so highly-paid and sought-after, there isn't really the option of collective bargaining. And that's even assuming the kinds of snowflakes who tend to work in this industry would accept that Break The Build Joe deserves the same pay as Rewrote It In Rust Rob.

Personally I maintain my own principles around what will drive me to leave, but I have long given up hope that my decision to quit will have any impact whatsoever on the direction of the company. In the past it's barely even had an impact on the people I directly worked with. I'm just not that important, and neither is any other IC or low-level manager. I think most of us try to find a company whose direction we can tolerate just enough to continue working there for the cash. And, I suppose, there are thousands of people for whom Meta still passes that bar.

[nmfisher]

Upvoted for "Break the Build Joe" and "Rewrote It In Rust Rob".

[random314]

Break the Build Bob would have a better rhythm :)

[Eisenstein]

Bob the Build Breaker

[867-5309]

can he break it?

[marcosdumay]

> The guys on the top who make the real decisions are on the top because they are experts at driving their vision forward regardless of whatever happens underneath or around them.

That's a funny way to say "rich".

[aporetics]

And that’s just another way to say the end justifies the means.

Note that, among other things, the power of “the end justifies the means” lies in how it is reductive.

[rcarr]

"The question is not whose values are correct but whether you can work in a situation where good work on your part will perpetuate values you don't believe in. If you leave, you'll be making the greatest possible contribution to your own well-being, and you just might help propagate your values."

Understanding The Professional Programmer, p19 - Gerald Weinberg

[AtlasBarfed]

Case 1) FBWorker thinks its a boondoggle, but is neutral on Facebook, and can read the political tea leaves. Your basic mercenary corporate footsoldier. So stay and get FAANGpaid.

Case 2) FBWorker drinks koolaid (mabye because they cant keep FAANGpaid from forming their identity). Probably noob out of college or someone that just wants FAANG on the resume. Stay and build it. Probably not a lot of talent. And get FAANGpaid.

Case 3) FBWorker generally hates Facebook, maybe a holdover from pre-monetization FB days, why stop your enemy from making a huge mistake? Wait, AND you get FAANGpaid?

Case 4) FBWorker who is principled moralist who once believed they could change the world for the better.

One of the reasons Facebook is in trouble, especially if they actually think the Meta pivot is key, is that almost all their employees are Case 1 or Case 3.

Case 4 quit long ago or doesn't apply anymore.

The question is, is there even a semblance of a core of Case 2 in facebook? Doubt it.

So Marky Z is like a dictator now. Yeah he's top dog of his realm, but motivating people to any fundamental degree isn't possible. Money only goes so far. The organization has purged all the truly motivated talent.

[dohdhdaa]

Haha yes. There was always a lot of drama at Facebook about “leakers”. People HATE them, they don’t understand why they have no “honor” and don’t quit if they hate Facebook so much. They call for witch hunts in comments whenever something leaks.

People seemed completely unable to connect the dots, that if you think Facebook is evil, why not leak all their stuff to the press, and get PAID to do it?

[cgrealy]

> It is intensely weird to me that people hold the opinion that their company is building something that is bad for the world, and yet they stay there and continue to help build it.

Not really. People fear change. Engineers at Meta almost certainly have good pay, work with people they like, have a generally comfortable life.

[lozenge]

I think the common opinion is that nobody will want or use the metaverse. Getting paid to build something that nobody will use isn't immoral, it's amoral.

[__MatrixMan__]

Helping an advertiser trick kids into spending their time in a pupil dilation monitor/retinal scanner so that ads can be optimized for impact based on biometric markers isn't amoral, it's immoral.

[otabdeveloper4]

I know it's an accepted sci-fi trope and people (including advertisers) genuinely believe it's the future, but advertising doesn't work that way.

When you peel back the layers and figure out how this sausage is made, underneath it's just sociology and broad target audiences. (Age, sex, location, social status.)

Retinal scans don't help solve this problem.

[squeaky-clean]

I mostly agree with your point, but it's a bit more specific than that. I used to work in airfare advertising and we could target ads at people who were interested in certain locations. You searched for flights to Paris and they were $600 and didn't purchase? Well now there's a weekend deal where it's $450 and we'll bid on Instagram ads that target you. You've flown to Europe, Asia and North America? Here's some Latam flight ads. Flew to Chicago over the Christmas holiday? We'll show you some Chicago flight ads next October.

We didn't get access to the actual user lists, but the queries you could build in your ad bids could include these factors. We were also in a special "Ads For Travel" partner program, so we probably had bid options not available to the average FB ads account manager.

[Eisenstein]

Retinal scans do not help; however, 'eye tracking', which is currently available in Quest Pro and should filter down to the consumer tier headset in a year or two, does. When Meta knows what you look at, and for how long, and in which patterns, then advertising will legitimately have some 'next level' shit to work with.

[__MatrixMan__]

The role of the retinal scans, I expect, has more to do with identifying which human is in the headset. In the metaverse, biometrics of that sort will be like cookies that you can't clear.

[__MatrixMan__]

Ok, how about this: Helping an advertiser is immoral.

Creepy methods aside, you're trying to get people to do something other than what they wanted to do today.

[langsoul-com]

They shipped 10 million quest 2's. That ain't nobody.

[Mikeb85]

People are interested in VR for gaming. Not for the metaverse. Zuck should be building a console or something, not wasting time on something no one wants.

[entropicgravity]

He might try buying Amazon Alexa from Bezos, that sounds promising. At the very least it would be cheaper.

[sangnoir]

> It is intensely weird to me that people hold the opinion that their company is building something that is bad for the world, and yet they stay there and continue to help build it

Show me a big tech company (or any MNC) that is not "building something that is bad for the world". The broader question is why do people keep working for big tech, and that has been answered many times before (lots of money, smart colleagues, interesting problems, and a difference in perception on culpability.)

[midoridensha]

>The broader question is why do people keep working for big tech

Also, if the alternative is "work for a small company", some of us have tried that before and that hasn't been very good either, just for different reasons (terrible pay, abusive management, toleration of sexual harassment, etc.).

[ekianjo]

> t is intensely weird to me that people hold the opinion that their company is building something that is bad for the world, and yet they stay there and continue to help build it.

Most people work for the pay. Thats why you pay people: to make them work on something they dont necessarily like.

Not everyone needs to be or to act like an activist.

[marssaxman]

Some people are driven by more blatantly mercenary priorities than others, but most people prefer to perform work which aligns with their morality and gains them the respect of others; it's part of that whole "hierarchy of needs".

It is of course possible to meet one's higher-level needs in other parts of one's life, but if your career is actively opposing your values, it becomes that much harder to make up for what you are missing in the limited time remaining. If you can't make that balance work, burnout and depression are likely.

[ekianjo]

> most people prefer to perform work which aligns with their morality and gains them the respect of others; it's part of that whole "hierarchy of needs".

Your values can only be worth that much, and a big check will make you forget them faster than you think. After all, that's what corruption actually exists: people willing to compromise on whatever they believe or used to believe for financial benefits.

Also don't forget that people will rationalize everything. There's no one going to work every day and hating it - if you stay in a place you don't really like, ultimately you will find reasons to stay and to justify your choice.

[whatshisface]

I think he's saying that nobody internally thinks it will work, not that anyone internally thinks it will create the world of Snowcrash.

[dreamcompiler]

> It is intensely weird to me that people hold the opinion that their company is building something that is bad for the world, and yet they stay there and continue to help build it.

Facebook is a giant privacy-violating advertising company that demonstrated repeatedly that it was bad for the world long before Meta happened. And yet they attracted a huge amount of great talent who knew going in what FB was. Microsoft did the same thing in the 90s.

People have their own reasons for joining such companies. Maybe it's stability, or the quality of the team, or freedom, or it looks good on a resume, or maybe it's just the money. I'm not going to judge somebody for any of that.

If I had been working at FB I might have tried to transfer to the metaverse team. Even if I had no confidence it would work it would have been much more interesting than that dying social network. And probably less evil, because it will probably die before it gets big enough to matter.

[concordDance]

> Facebook is a giant privacy-violating advertising company that demonstrated repeatedly that it was bad for the world long before Meta happened.

The "bad for the world" stories I've heard turned out to not have substance (Cambridge analytica and the "harmful to young girls" study). Are you aware of something else?

[birdyrooster]

Humans are too easy to manipulate for "change things from within." We try to please people subconsciously and it causes us to betray ourselves. Some people have grown beyond this vulnerability, but for many of us its permanent.

[brundolf]

Some people work on making the metaverse more addicting, others work on improving instagram's accessibility, others work on abstracted computer science problems that only happen to be under the umbrella of the same corporation that makes Facebook

It's not black and white; there are degrees of separation. You and I participate in an economy that somewhere, many layers down, causes human rights abuses. No ethical consumption under capitalism.

It's impossible to separate completely. Everyone has to pick and choose how many layers of separation (and from what) are needed for them to feel okay about their effect on society. For you or me that might mean we won't work at Facebook or Amazon, but your startup's angel investors aren't angels either. Neither are the companies you buy your devices from, or the banks you lend your savings to.

This isn't to say we shouldn't care, but we shouldn't pretend things are clear-cut, and we should take care throwing rocks at glass houses.

[Simon_O_Rourke]

> It is intensely weird to me that people hold the opinion that their company is building something that is bad for the world, and yet they stay there and continue to help build it.

From Oppenheimer onwards this hasn't been too unusual - but what is unusual I think in Meta's case is the fact it's so widespread by smart folks.

[cratermoon]

> It is intensely weird to me that people hold the opinion that their company is building something that is bad for the world, and yet they stay there and continue to help build it.

Hoo boy, the old "just take another job" trope. I've got news: First, in this late-stage capitalism neoliberal hell, people have to cling to their jobs for more reasons than anyone can count. Second, where are they going to go? Who is hiring that isn't also doing things that are bad for the world, at a rate that someone with a student loan, a family, a mortgage, and college-bound kids can afford?

Knock it off with the "just get another job" thing and come join the real world.

[Eisenstein]

You know, the 'just get another job' attitude is annoying because of the lack of empathy, but the 'you have no right to talk about principles because I want to be upper-middle-class' attitude is annoying because even though we all rationalize, being aggressive about it to the extent that you denigrate a person for having ideals makes me feel a sort of doomed misanthropy.

[version_five]

"Big tech" - particularly facebook and google, I think are widely considered to be at worst actively evil and at best responsible for the race to the bottom in the internet experience and public discourse that's happened over the last 15 years. But they also appear to pay really well, have locally cool problems to work on, and have lots of work that has no relevance to destroying society, e.g. all the AI research they both do, which I don't think it's possible to overstate how important it's been for the growth of the field, in a very good way.

So it's easy to see the dilemma in a sense. It's maybe really just a concentrated example of capitalism generally. All money has blood on it

[musha68k]

Somebody correct me if I’m wrong but hasn’t ML research ultimately been a result of public funding, at least to the largest extent?

[Mistletoe]

"I'm old enough to have read Snow Crash the week it came out and IT WAS A DYSTOPIA, why are we building it?"

This is such an incredible quote, I love it. And I love that you said it in your group chat. I wish more people in tech could see this forest from within the trees.

[jcadam]

> "I'm old enough to have read Snow Crash the week it came out and IT WAS A DYSTOPIA, why are we building it?"

But at least it was a dystopia where pizza delivery was an exciting business.

[webmaven]

> But at least it was a dystopia where pizza delivery was an exciting business.

It wasn't an exciting business.

Pizza delivery was an exciting job (in all the worst ways a job can be exciting, or, TBH, just stressful), but the business part of it was quite boring. The corporate takeover denouement was perhaps the most boring scene in the book, and barely justified the "Chekhov's Guns" that were required to give a baddie a single "oh shit" moment with no payoff.

[rightbyte]

Oh ... so in dystopian Snow Crash (I read up on it) there is a also dystopian virtual reality named Metaverse. Well, I wonder i Zuck knew about that.

Interesting that the book essentially seems to render the "gig economy" as some dystopian element. Quite good prediction.

[sangnoir]

It's all very We are proud to introduce the "Torment Nexus 1", which you may know from the hit sci-fi novel "Don't Create the Torment Nexus"[0]

0. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/torment-nexus

[andruby]

I can only recommend you to read the book. It's amazing.

It is so relevant for today, you'd be forgiven for not knowing it was actually published in 1992.

But really, it's probably the best book I've ever read.

[mcv]

If we're going to see someone driving around with a nuclear bomb in their sidecar, it's more likely to happen in Russia than in the US, though.

[funcDropShadow]

But "Reason" is absolutely thinkable in the U.S.

[SoftTalker]

Maybe the decision was made based on who was sharing critical opinions internally.

[random314]

I am a huge fan of your work, Eric. I started out in PL and ended up in ML, working on far less impactful projects than you did :)

However, I don't believe metaverse is a waste of time, at least for business users. This can eliminate all office space use in about 5-10 years if the hardware and software is ready, which it very likely will. Or maybe a wall to wall LED screen will do the trick for remote social presence, making the headset redundant.

It can spill over from the office to personal lives like the PC did. But anyway, hope you continue to work on cool things.

[Aperocky]

Having previously worked at a data team before the pandemic eon which raison'd etre was "saving cost", the reality is it didn't.

We used advanced statistical concept and vended models for other teams/services to consume, but the truth is either it was just really obvious cost solutions that they didn't bother, or it didn't really work all that well (stats model are, unfortunately, prone to many interpretations).

I've since moved on to feature based team where I feel like I'm more on the ground. And recently was able to get rid of lots of cost just by.. looking at them. I remain skeptical of the teams that base itself on statistical models to reduce cost.

[milesward]

Badass response, I thought exactly the same thing

[SanjayMehta]

I'm fascinated by the amounts spent on this metaverse. Is it really USD 20 Billion? How is it partitioned across domains?

[jayd16]

The laissez-faire economics run amok US was the dystopia. The metaverse as a virtual chatroom was well liked, in universe.