[buildbot]

Seems like Zuckerberg had already made up his mind and needed an engineer to positively confirm his desired path through a very power imbalanced chat...

No shade towards the engineer at all, but besides the very first "My instinct is” comment the engineer literally could have just been ChatGPT and Zuck would have gotten a similar convo.

[pinkmuffinere]

I don't feel that the engineer answered poorly at all. They're answering a really broad strategic question, with no / very little hard data to go off of -- of course their answer is vague, there's very little certainty about anything in the question (not even price of acquisition!). I think they accurately call out the benefits and risks of the different paths. IMO this is as much as can be expected. Before "pulling trigger" on any of these decisions, there will have to be a lot more analysis, negotiation, etc, that they're just not going to get to in a dm. If the engineer was the kind of person to give a single definitive answer in this situation, I don't think they would be trusted with this kind of conversation.

[buildbot]

I completely agree, they answered as you or I would have, or even better; if we were in the same situation!

It’s more interesting that Zuckerberg would ask this, at least to me.

[pinkmuffinere]

Ah I see — ya I do see the strangeness of a CEO such a big question with so little context

[NoboruWataya]

In fairness if the founder and CEO pings me and asks me who the company should buy, you can bet I'm giving a similarly hand wavy bullshit answer.

[ajkjk]

that's so weird, I would be honest; it wouldn't even occur to me not to be. maybe that's why I never get involved in any internal politics.

[rich_sasha]

I'm not sure it's a bullshit answer at all. They present pros and cons. Zuck can then take them into consideration, given wider strategic consideration.

Much more useful than "this one".

[buildbot]

Oh yeah 100%, me too!

[ysofunny]

if this cartoon [1] is a reliable source, then maybe it's not (or possibly didn't used to be) such a strange thing at facebook

[1] https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts

[ce4]

I dont think one could reason that. Maybe some insight: The author is an engineer and had worked at Google and published the Goomics strip internally. It is also available at https://goomics.net/62

PS: Later he worked at Twitter and commented that also: https://twittoons.com/

[croisillon]

i think it was more a reference to their (old) welcome page https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-facebook-social-network-in...

[grugagag]

Yeah, I've seen this one before but it never ceases to amuse me.

[s1mplicissimus]

I had the same thought, this sounds like ChatGPT! Then again, doesn't most corporate communication? Or maybe it's the other way round and ChatGPT sounds like corporate fluff because it was trained like that?