A core problem is that FB culture is way too positive and happy, and hard criticism is received poorly. The politics to get anything done if your name isn't Mark is borderline impossible.
I left a year ago, and I've become beyond happy.
I feel like I got to enjoy a couple of years before the company started to lose its nimbleness. Feedback groups used to get responses from the people that actually built the things instead of contractors whose primary function is feedback group triage. Sometimes you could actually have an impact by giving feedback, and you could see others having those impacts as well.
When I left, it seemed like whatever wasn't planned for upfront at the planning meetings for each half just won't happen. Around 2018 I came to a team with a small feature request that I was happy to take on myself as long as they'd provide code review. I was told if I'd come to them a month ago they might've been able to do it, but now I'd need to wait until planning for the next half.
I think Portal is a perfect example of how slow to adapt the company has become. It's a fantastic video conferencing device, certainly the best at its price point. We happened to enter the pandemic with this device already available for sale, but we completely failed to capitalize on it. Zoom become the dominant video conferencing service pretty quickly. We failed to roll out Zoom support until October of 2020, when everyone had already established their video conferencing routines and were less likely to see the benefit of a dedicated device.
Portal ended up failing so hard as a consumer product that it got transferred over to the Workplace division.
I'd argued internally that at the very least we should allow sideloading of apps. Portal is just Android. People could run their videoconferencing application of choice, as well as any other apps. That would make the Portal more competitive versus an Android tablet, which all have okay videoconferencing as well as the whole world of Android apps.
The Portal camera is fisheye so we'd need to modify Android to let regular apps pull a normal image using the Android camera APIs, but that's totally doable.
In the distant past these kinds of requests would've at least gotten engagement from people working on the product. In 2020, they got a chipper response from a contractor who I guess filed them in a feature requests tool where they went to die. Oh, the contractor also would provide directions on how to use the web browser in lieu of apps. Like the first iPhone.
Thanks for your insight, but the Portal failure shouldn't be surprising. There are a large number of people who would never want to have a private conversation or meeting using Facebook infrastructure or be forced to create a Facebook account to join a meeting. As far as Zoom support, again, why would anyone trust Facebook infrastructure with private meetings?
Aside from the trust issue, why buy hardware from FB just to have meetings?
Have you ever heard of Whatsapp? More than a billion people use it for private communication daily. Maybe not in the US, but elsewhere on the planet. You know who owns Whatsapp? Meta does.
Granted that they've at least tripled MAU since, but that's the power of network effects. There's a heavy dose of "in spite of" rather than "because of". On the other hand if Meta tried to, say, merge Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger, I think they'd lose half their users overnight.
Similarly, if Meta bought Zoom (and kept it running as it does today), most businesses probably wouldn't switch. Zoom already owns the market.
Zoom's continued survival still surprises me. There was a point in time during its meteoric rise, early in the pandemic, when stories broke about it being spyware for China and a security threat, and its use was subsequently banned in many places. Then some months later people were back to using it, as if nothing ever happened.
Meanwhile in TEAMS people dont know how to do things.
Recently I had a meeting that was supposed to be recorded, firsf nobody could record it; now the supplier side does not know how to share it as a downloadable file.
The Microsoft cloud experience is pure trash from productivity point of view.
In comparison, I use teams for my two person startup and we can only get that absolute trash fire working reliably about 75% of the time.
Facebook messenger is another example, hundreds of million of people use it all the time.
You are arguing against an obviously silly false premise. I said "large numbers of people" were unwilling to use FB for private communication.
In fact, it lost quite a bit of users when Facebook bought it, as many tried to move their networks to Signal, Threema etc
So what was said is exactly right: nobody trusts Meta, rightly so
By the way, case in point, look what happened about Facebooks promise to keep Whatsapp data separate and private
Seriously, this is a really dense comment from previous poster. Sure people don't like the idea of a dedicated hardware appliance with camera and microphones from Meta but the idea that folks are so paranoid that they won't use any of Meta's private communications systems or infra is beyond out of touch with reality.
I had a couple models of Portal. Really useful products but they literally didn't iterate on adding features fast enough and they locked it out from the existing Android ecosystem. Too complacent IHMO. On top of that the built-in browser was a purposely limited version of chromium that seemed like whatever the custom user-agent was would just cause problems with all sorts of web-apps especially Google's (couldn't even sign into YouTube etc, got "unsupported browser" errors all the time).
The Portal TV is still the only good Consumer Home TV based VC system I've ever used (so good that its the only Portal device Cisco wouldn't ship WebEx on probably because it would be too competitive against their own hardware I suspect is the reason).
A large number of people in your circle / on HN / etc perhaps, but I think the vast majority of the general population have no such concern.
If you talk about privacy they don’t care but they absolutely do when it comes to “I was talking to my friend about X and suddenly I’m seeing ads for it everywhere - my phone must be listening to me”. Their phone may not actually be listening to them but as soon as they see what it means, people hate how their data is used. They just never made the connection before.
Facebook is not very popular among IT people in corporate world.
The story mode was much loved as well - my mother (an ex kindergarten teacher) would read the stories to my niece and nephew and they loved the AR effects and filters it applied to her, in tandem with the story.
My family uses them so my parents can see my kids and they are great. We plop down on the floor in front of it and everyone has a chat, sees the kids, etc. propping up phones and straining to hear/see things is much inferior.
This was conceived prior to the implosion of the Facebook brand during the Cambridge Analytical revelations. It's hard to say for sure how successful Portal would have been in another universe where that didn't happen.
If it worked the way people wanted and was available in April 2020 people would have used it.
For much of the world, Whatsapp video calls were the standard way to keep in touch.
I wouldn't be surprised if Meta was the number one way people have private conversations on planet earth.
Talking about company ip? Not a chance in hell.
When making a purchasing decision for company comms tools, guess which of those two have to be considered.
Personally I wouldn't use any chat service for super sensitive conversations about company comms and IP that didn't have strong encryption as well as limitations on how messages can be backed up as well as disappearing messages. I think Signal is the only system that is semi-popular that does this where by default backups don't leave the device unencrypted.
Privacy is taken more seriously at Facebook than any other place I've ever worked. It's drilled into you from day one that we have systems in place to catch you accessing things you shouldn't and you will be immediately fired if you do.
You can make mistakes that bring the entire site down and cost the company millions and they won't fire you. If you try to bypass privacy controls on an ex-girlfriend's post, you're gone.
Yes, they hoover up a ton of personal data. But they guard it like the crown jewels. If you do want your data deleted, they'll delete it. I've worked on the systems responsible for this where we had to reason through what to do with things like offline backups.
Selling the data itself would be giving away a huge component of what differentiates their product from other advertising platforms. It would be like Coca Cola selling the recipe for Coca Cola.
I know there are lots of people here knowingly redefining the meaning of sell in this regard, but doing so is really harmful to the privacy cause since most companies do actually sell user data so we need that distinction.
Unless you are selling it to the highest bidder on behalf of the company, and that gets you an immediate promotion.
If it's just Android then yeah, intercept the camera API to let the portal stuff work with any app and you've got yourself a killer product getting put on every grandparents TV.
I am legit excited about the idea of having VR eye contact, and would gladly pilot headsets for my team. But nobody wants to be on Facebook's platform. It's embarrassing to even talk about it. And I'm frustrated that something that should be a fun, cool, liberating, wide open new platform is so stifled and locked down.
It’s far less locked down than an iPhone.
When did that happen? Last I checked, sideloading was a potentially bannable offense (as in effectively bricking your device and losing you your Facebook account).
For a more managed option, there’s SideQuest:
Also Meta itself offers AppLab which is a less strictly curated app store.
Meta desperately wants you to write apps for the Quest platform. Nobody is getting banned. (You don’t need a FB account anymore either.)
Even if they have now changed their opinion on what can be done a large amount of damage is done. No-one will actively monitor that have their changed their terms. I was also under the impression that it's FB account and do the tiniest mistake and you lose it all. Thankfully it's just FB account so unlike with Google no real damage will be done.
Even if the things are better now I kinda have moved on, like many others.
The "grey area" is modding games(notably Beat Saber), since it involves replacing the APK with an altered one without the consent of the developer. And if the developer sells DLC, that cuts into their profit and maybe they'll threaten to sue Facebook for damages since they created the development tools and authorized development accounts that allow people to do it.
The immediate response I heard from everyone who heard about it (not in my tech circle) was an immediate NOPE. Followed by “I’m not letting Facebook put a camera in my house.”
I don’t think the failure can be blamed on the lack of zoom support.
I wanted to buy it for personal work meetings usage, corporate usage to setup in conferencing room, etc, but..
[1] zoom wasn't supported.
[2] not available worldwide to buy.
[3] regularly out of stock when it even came.
Oh so now there is a Xmas lunch, but a third of the group is not invited. Or "No ice cream" for you.
It is funny how it was the small things that pissed me off. Who in their right mind even has a Xmas lunch without everyone ...
It was always one manager layer disconnected from the actual contractors that pulled off the BS meany things. The direct management knew that had to give ice cream to contractors too.
What's that?
The Clayton M Christensen solution to big companies ignoring obvious problems is to have isolated small teams “infrapreneurship” who aren’t under the pressures of the larger org. With Meta’s push towards VR it’s obvious Oculus’s purpose is now Meta’s purpose. And all the downside that comes with such a thing.
The first chat was basically an XMPP service. It was decent, it federated outside of Google, it was fully functional. It even supported group channels (XMPP conferences) internally. But I don't think that was ever exposed to the public.
Then Hangouts was created. It was, per usual at Gooogle, a ground-up rewrite. IIRC not the same team. So they spent at least a couple years playing catch up to get feature parity with the XMPP chat. Worse, Hangouts was one of the first services to suffer from strict team-created "Personas" design philosophy. Any time anyone would complain about a feature, or miss-feature, it was flatly ignored because "You're not one of our Personas". It took years of complaints to get them to change their minds.
By the time Hangouts was good enough to fully replace the previous service it was now boring and people left the team for other new projects. Because maintenance won't get you promoted.
The other random chat services were basically experiential toys.
Now we have Meet, which is is likely another case of "Hangouts is unmaintainable tech, we need to re-write it". Years of getting up to feature parity. And miss-features that won't get fixed.
Every decision since then has been pro-ad network technical competition.
Add to that it was a big source of spam that nobody wanted to deal with.
Apparently the team tried really hard to get more companies on board with opening up federation. But I think the only "major" service that did was what was left of AOL.
Its more because they killed their already working, well-accepted Google Chat app, not seeing gigantic profit or any market control benefit from it. Somehow they thought it was a better idea to have some 'chat' through the browser - which resulted in whatever 'Hangouts' was. Prioritized 'engineering' and profits over users as its so normal for large public corporations.
Then Slack and Discord came and wiped the floor with all of them.
DuckDuckGo is great but it’s not nipping at their heels meaningfully.
Most corporate deaths look like Sears. The writing on the wall was there for over two decades.
Hell it was there for four decades, double that time. Walmart was running circles around Sears by the 70s.
Pretty quickly, they figured out upper management had no interest in their ideas to make Sears into a viable online retailer. Everybody left or started coasting. They all knew the company was doomed but cashed their paychecks. After all, that’s literally what they were being paid to do.
Changing offices is an expensive exercise so they wouldn’t want to risk renting space from somewhere that is likely to go under in the next year or two.
My point is the dynamic I mention explains the problems of wework, and is not proved wrong by the argument you put forward, paraphrased, that "businesses have evaluated long-term risk of renting at wework so wework is not at risk"
You keep discussing a long term context yet my comment was just as much about short term risk too.
You don’t have to agree with me, but I’d appreciate it if you didn’t “paraphrase” my comment in a way that’s disingenuous to the original point it was making.
Search is already heavily ML-powered. Right now it’s impossible to provide ad-sponsored fully-AI-powered search and make it profitable. Remember, you are actually not paying for it at the cost, and users that actually click ads are subsidizing you.
But when it will be possible, Google is going to be in perfect position to capitalize on it.
The current model doesn’t work for this new reality. They’ll have to find a new model. And if history is any clue, the suits will be unwilling to change
Do you need to search and figure things out if you have a personal assistant to do that for you?
Try asking “what herbs and spices go well in a chilli?” in both. I get a sensible, rough answer from ChatGPT within seconds. From Google I get page after page of content farms hiding information in amongst ads and life-story filler.
She was trying to find poems that went viral during the pandemic. Googling it showed a bunch of mediocre articles or irrelevant news stories
I asked chatGPT and it gave me a list of 10 poems by relatively well known poets. A brief review showed that these poems were, indeed, viral during the pandemic. Saved at least 15 minutes of Googling.
There are a lot of pitfalls and erroneous assumptions built into both Google's current search and the information used to train AI/ML models. Two big ones are "assuming that a person searching for something and accepting the answer means it's a successful search" and "assuming a person searching/asking for something actually wants what they're asking for".
I'm a librarian with several years of reference experience under my belt and neither of those things are true. They're both good tools for a well considered and well informed information search, but that 'well considered and well informed' is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Are there tools that do that well right now? Do you know of (maybe niche) projects exploring such ideas?
Kodak invented digital cameras but jettisoned it because they ate into its existing business. Will the same happen with Google?
Look at Meta, and how Apple borked their primary cash cow.
Now, mostly due to concerns about state spying, many jurisdictions are passing enhanced privacy bills.
On top of that, the entire planet now wants cash for news listings.
And the EU is repeatedly extending its legislation, making Pii collection and tracking less and less profitable.
The US keeps considering similar bills. Alphabet can lobby all it wants, but even so, these laws will be passed eventually.
Google needs to smarten up.
It’s a poison that seems to seep into organizations as they get larger.
I once gave a talk about “Enterprise Entrepreneurs” after being labeled as one. It can be a good approach to prevent stagnation as grass-roots initiatives often generate great ideas in large companies.
Unfortunately the practice requires executive sponsorship, which can be hard to attain if executives feel *their position and stature is being undermined by subordinates.
So instead of VCs you invest company capital into them.
Obviously 99% of the time employees just leave and startups win the day. Which is fine. But that's basically just how it is. So you either adapt or die until the monopoly/cash cow runs its course.
Facebook turning into Meta making the 'startup' be the whole companies mission is a bold new idea, which I'm skeptical can work. But it's interesting.
The company takes the risk rather than you personally. If it fails but you maintain good relations with the rest of the company you lose nothing and just transfer elsewhere (I guess, I’ve never worked at a big company preferring to go it alone)
I’m far more motivated by working on cool projects, so the reward for me is just as salient if I build something cool within someone else’s company or my own… I guess, having never done the latter.
But yeah, also tbh, risk is a big factor.
Their past choices have consequences. It’s too late for them to “just not” do anything to reduce that burden.
Often companies get excited about a new idea, staff and finance them well… then after a year or two they get thrown into the wider system and expected to survive.
Eventually they are absorbed and managed as if they are the old cash cow, needing layers of management, risk adversion, accelerated timelines, and new ‘processes’ to fix every small problem instead of focusing on the bigger picture.
Spin "the other bets" out as a separate company.
Capitalize it separately.
Literally just don't have it as part of the parent company.
The only advantage of having the company inside the "parent" increasingly becomes accounting tricks.
Concealing excess profits via shuffling them to the "other bet" is the biggest trick of them all.
All publicly listed companies actively hide profits from shareholders.
Who might want the capital as a dividend.
Aha, glad somebody is seeing the same thing I'm seeing.
The problem with Google is that it is too large, and too successful. Their idea of having experimental projects is a good one, the problem is that Google makes so much money that they don't commit to them. They become too dilettante about them.
The fix is to do spin-offs, say keeping a minority stake at less than 20%. This generates capital for Google, gives them a share of the upside, but they don't have too much influence on the spin-off. So it's Death or Glory for the spin-off. They are forced to make whatever it is they invented work, or face extinction. There is a smaller management team, focussed on success.
This strikes me as a much better proposition than what we see at the moment, with Google just dabbling around pouring money into something they'll eventually get bored with.
You'd think that what with all the big brains at Google, someone would have thought of this. Maybe someone at Goldmans should make a pitch.
1) An enormous pile of cash would accumulate on Google's balance sheet. 2) The spinoffs would be subject to normal commercial rules about risk, rate of return and such. 3) The spinoffs couldn't be "brand Google." Which is a not-inconsiderable thing.
Clearly though, it's a good call.
I was fortunate as I joined a team that was growing and had heat under them which gave me opportunities to go ham in a space I care about.
I hadn't heard this this term before but I think it is pretty accurate in many organizations. Nothing is worth doing as its impossible to prove ROI conclusively - just do what the boss says instead.
But sometimes lack of cynicism can be disastrous. I'm reminded of a story, recounted in Francis Spufford's "Red Plenty", of Leonid Kantorovich who invented linear programming, and wrote a letter to Stalin politely suggesting he was doing economics wrong, he should do things his way instead. At the time Stalin was in his paranoid phase and had a tendency to murder anyone he noticed. Luckily for Kantorovich, a much more cynical bureaucrat intercepted the letter before Stalin could read it, and didn't pass it on.
When things are unacceptably bad, it's actually necessary to realize things are unacceptably bad, and not pretend that there's always a nice and right way out of it.
People who suppress their own doubts force others to carry their doubts for them.
oh wow.. never thought they could be happy at FB
Hedonic adaptation is real. You compare yourself to your peer group, in which there’s always people living larger than you, stocks appreciated more than yours, bought their house earlier than you, higher earning spouse than yours (or any spouse at all if you’re single), generational wealth from China, etc. And homeownership in the Bay Area is such an insatiable black hole that this kind of money merely puts you in the running. You’ll never be, like, unable to repair a household appliance - which is better than many people! - but neither are you just waltzing through life milestones in the way people think when they see these figures. You’re mostly a pass-through vehicle from your company to local property owners.
Some companies are more top down and some companies are more entrepreneurial. Amazon is famous for assigning just the right amount of work to break you before your stock vests. Apple has rigid and precise opinions about what it wants built, with engineers discouraged from scratching their own itches. Facebook on the other hand is all about initiative, with engineers being almost like Wall Street traders: come up with ideas and implement them on your own, and in your performance review we’ll check the numbers to see whether you made us money or not. Like trading, you might have a good hypothesis that just didn’t pan out, or something else outside your control might have shifted, but that’s not going to save you. You have to be right. It’s stressful! But one thing that happens in places run this way is a pretty strong social norm against trying to stop anything before it happens. If someone wants to run an AB test, however stupid it seems, they get to run it, and you have to trust in the data (and data analysis) to reveal whether it was really a good idea or not.
That instantly becomes political because not everyone agrees on what "nicer" is.
The worst part is when people pretend that things are difficult. You can't just suggest that someone not waste time on an obviously bad idea; you must acknowledge that the team's development strategy is a complex, multifaceted governance problem, and many quarters of sync meetings will be necessary to drive the appropriate alignment with all stakeholders and establish prioritization and scheduling on an action item to form a spot committee that will deliberate on the necessity of a course correction.
It's suffocating, it produces terrible products, but it pays really well.
It used to be an incredibly fulfilling place to work.
However it feels like the time of social media is already coming to an end. With the companies filling our timelines with ever more crap in a futile attempt to 'engage' us, they are only driving us ever more away.
At least, the kool-aid tasted great.
I guess they don’t value x1000 talent
The hope is that it creates a can-do culture. Downside is that it can create a culture where no one feels safe criticizing bad ideas.