It's interesting that Meta's workers fought against mistreatment without a union. I kept thinking, unions were created to give workers a collective voice about work conditions.
1. How many of the workers would be open to a union? Would Zuckerberg fire anyone who engages in any union activity or just asks about forming one? Is there a blacklist of tech worker organizers? Or why isn't there a tech worker union symp blacklist is probably the better question.
2. When Zuckerberg's VR nonsense lost the company billions of dollars, not to mention wasted time and talent, he decided to fire the workers who did what they were tasked with. He didn't say I made an extremely poor decision, I wasn't accepting feedback that my decision was wrong that could have avoided this huge loss in money and credibility. We had to fire some people who great. I'm going to step back for a bit and let someone else run the company while keeping my 51 percent. The type of leader who doesn't take responsibility for their actions that hurt their team is not worthy of respect.
3. It turns out Zuckerberg has a low opinion of his organization's contractors. Are the contractors doing substantially simpler work than the full timers. Why does Meta use contractors? Do they get to opt out of things they are uncomfortable with or just get fired? This also gets me wondering how are non technical staff treated?
4. Trying to improve morale by improved snack offerings during punitive layoffs is something else. Those people are not serious or they despise their workers.
5. The idea of using LLMs or decision support systems to replace all the human workers seems ridiculous because most things people do aren't captured by a simple decision tree. Even if you could how many hunters
Hundreds of thousands of tasks are worth automating let alone dealing with edge cases, concurrency problems.
6. And then it wasn't engineered to prevent data leaks. I haven't worked at that level but with all the code analysis tools and engineering best practices I don't think there's any excuse for data leaks of that sort.
7. Why is it that these CEOs think only their job shouldn't be automated.
The worker morale angle matters, but the deeper issue is strategy whiplash.
1. Meta keeps asking employees to build around a moving narrative: metaverse, AI assistants, agents, superintelligence, and now maybe AI compute as cloud capacity.
2. That creates execution drag. A company can buy GPUs, hire talent, and rename labs, but it cannot rebuild trust every time the internal religion changes.
3. AI needs iteration. Organizations need coherence. When the product roadmap keeps chasing the next narrative, workers are not resisting innovation.
People seem to think the prime directive is to make employees happy. The prime directive is to satisfy shareholders through returns on investments. No one wants unhappy employees, but employee happiness matters most in so much as it impacts ongoing returns for investors.
It's interesting that Meta's workers fought against mistreatment without a union. I kept thinking, unions were created to give workers a collective voice about work conditions.
1. How many of the workers would be open to a union? Would Zuckerberg fire anyone who engages in any union activity or just asks about forming one? Is there a blacklist of tech worker organizers? Or why isn't there a tech worker union symp blacklist is probably the better question.
2. When Zuckerberg's VR nonsense lost the company billions of dollars, not to mention wasted time and talent, he decided to fire the workers who did what they were tasked with. He didn't say I made an extremely poor decision, I wasn't accepting feedback that my decision was wrong that could have avoided this huge loss in money and credibility. We had to fire some people who great. I'm going to step back for a bit and let someone else run the company while keeping my 51 percent. The type of leader who doesn't take responsibility for their actions that hurt their team is not worthy of respect.
3. It turns out Zuckerberg has a low opinion of his organization's contractors. Are the contractors doing substantially simpler work than the full timers. Why does Meta use contractors? Do they get to opt out of things they are uncomfortable with or just get fired? This also gets me wondering how are non technical staff treated?
4. Trying to improve morale by improved snack offerings during punitive layoffs is something else. Those people are not serious or they despise their workers.
5. The idea of using LLMs or decision support systems to replace all the human workers seems ridiculous because most things people do aren't captured by a simple decision tree. Even if you could how many hunters
Hundreds of thousands of tasks are worth automating let alone dealing with edge cases, concurrency problems.
6. And then it wasn't engineered to prevent data leaks. I haven't worked at that level but with all the code analysis tools and engineering best practices I don't think there's any excuse for data leaks of that sort.
7. Why is it that these CEOs think only their job shouldn't be automated.
Funny he got asked about the feed. The answer is "more slop on the way".
It’s a pity three months has become the relevant horizon. In the bigger scheme of things it doesn’t matter
Strong piece.
The worker morale angle matters, but the deeper issue is strategy whiplash.
1. Meta keeps asking employees to build around a moving narrative: metaverse, AI assistants, agents, superintelligence, and now maybe AI compute as cloud capacity.
2. That creates execution drag. A company can buy GPUs, hire talent, and rename labs, but it cannot rebuild trust every time the internal religion changes.
3. AI needs iteration. Organizations need coherence. When the product roadmap keeps chasing the next narrative, workers are not resisting innovation.
They are debugging management.
Meta seems to have one of those in excess.
America’s Favorite Reptizoid!
People seem to think the prime directive is to make employees happy. The prime directive is to satisfy shareholders through returns on investments. No one wants unhappy employees, but employee happiness matters most in so much as it impacts ongoing returns for investors.
December 30: Meta is one electrician servicing a data center the size of Sacramento.
🤢