alt Hacker NewsMeta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable
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I think there is a bit of wider social norms piece missing as well on AI use in knowledge work context.
Someone forwarded an enormous amount of text over teams the other day at work. From someone (bless her) that always means well but usually averages about one spelling mistake per word and rarely goes over 20 words per message. Clearly copy paste chatgpt.
For say hn gang that thinks in terms of context shifts, information load and things on THAT wave length the problem with that situation is obvious but I realised then that is not at all obvious to the average public. She genuinely seemed to think she's helping me by spending 15 seconds typing in a prompt and having me spend the next 30 minutes untangling the AI slop.
There is zero understanding or consensus of acceptable practices around that sort of thing baked into societal norms right now.
"Many workers immediately revolted. In online comments, they blasted the tracking as a privacy violation, ..."
“How do we opt out?” - Meta employee
Poetic justice, or "dogfooding"
Well, yeah, management sees a weak labor market and imagines the ability to fire all those troublesome engineers. Remember, especially in recent years, tech management is made up predominantly of grads from a select set of "elite" universities, whose caliber is determined mostly by how rich the parents are. It's no surprise we're in a moment of extreme labor disdain. The idea engineers with years of education are as fungible as manual labor has been tried again and again with the same results. LLMs won't change that.
Here's how things play out: Zuck gets some idea, he's surrounded by a bunch of yes men who say "yes, this will definitely change the world", then it turns into this optics game of kissing the ring. You ask yourself "how could they blow 80B on the Metaverse like that", this is how.
DON'T JOIN META, no matter how fast the recruiters reply to your messages. No matter how cool the work sounds (the managers lie in team matching). There's a reason why the average tenure is <2 years.
It's a toxic and fear based culture. You join, the people around you are already thinking how to scapegoat you. People gatekeep actual work and save it for political favorites and everyone else on the outside is stuck cooking up bullshit projects. If you do manage to find work on your own, people will immediately start scheming to steal it
Mark hates leakers, so it is kind of intensely funny that the NYT seems to have a direct line to probably dozens of ICs. Ultimately, it's hard to keep secrets shared with 70,000 employees.
“There are safeguards in place to protect sensitive content, and the data is not used for any other purpose,”
I've heard this before in previous corporate jobs and the data ALWAYS ends up being used somewhere else. Usually in job performance reviews or tax documents about new vs maintenance work.
I noticed a lot more joy using AI from people at smaller companies or working by themselves :)
I say this as someone self employed that burned almost $1000 on tokens last month. And had. A lot of fun doing it.
Meta employees as a whole are highly insecure, both from a job security and a 'status' perspective. People jump ship to the latest thing (which was the Metaverse, now is the internal AI lab).
There's a massive restructuring going on - layoffs, reorgs - and an even more ruthless performance bar.
The internal spying is common across companies. The extent would shock most 'big company' employees.
The realization and angst IMO is more that the days of extremely great comp, job security (even if you're good) and career progression is over at Meta unless they figure this pivot out.
What will social media become when influencers aren't a thing, and "creators" is no longer a moat.
You imagine Mark must be sweating bullets right now, along with the rest of media.
Uber burning its whole AI budget in 4 months instead of 12, companies everywhere pressing employees to use AI whether or not it makes sense..
My cofounder and I get to “only” pay $200/mo to build our product while the hyperscalers burning tokens like crazy stave off price rises for people like us - thanks Zuck!
> it is cutting jobs to offset its A.I. spending, saying last month that it would slash 10 percent of its work force.
> Meta also introduced internal dashboards to track employees’ consumption of “tokens,” a unit of A.I. use that is roughly equivalent to four characters of text, four people said. Some said the dashboards were a pressure tactic to encourage competition with colleagues. That led some employees to make so many A.I. agents that others had to introduce agents to find agents, and agents to rate agents, two people said.
Maybe the first to be laid off should be the ones that thought it made sense to track token consumption. Goodhart's Law doesn't even apply in this scenario because that's a dumb metric whether or not you're using it to evaluate employees.
> “This data is very tightly controlled,” Mr. Bosworth replied. “This will not be a leak risk.”
Ooof. Famous last words.
Alternative to archive.is
No CAPTCHA, no Javascript, no DDoS directed at blog, no geoblocking
https://static.nytimes.com/narrated-articles/synthetic/artic...
I believe that any kind of partial automation is going to make the job more soul-crushing.
Ford style assembly lines made the work of the factory workers more miserable. Partially automated cashier did the same thing.
I don't think there is any point in trying to resist automation, as the efficiency benefits are too important.
This will probably get me down voted but I have zero sympathy for anyone who chooses to works for a company built up around the harvesting of personal information.
You do have a choice, and by staying you are making it. Stop playing at being a victim.
I still cannot fathom how Zuck continues to be the CEO after burning billions into misadventures. The Meta board must really like him.
Man, is Mark hiring someone to run this dumpster fire? I'll take a pay cut (compared to whoever is doing so now) and give it a vision to aim towards instead of the mindless laps he seems to be running through, I'll leave after a year, and it will likely still produce a better outcome than whatever is going on with it right now. I'm a nobody software developer, but I love tech and hate to see what could otherwise be successful fail.
I don't understand why he's struggling so hard with this stuff. AI shouldn't be forced on its employees or users. It should be something available to them, but not forced. I don't understand why he's burning time on so many bizarre things. There's plenty of things that could yield dividends with LLMs like optimizing them for speed while retaining serious accuracy, by coming up with new techniques. If he did that, and made a model that was exceptional at programming, he could compete with Claude Code easily, or Codex. Instead, I get the feeling he has no idea what he wants and is just burning funds endlessly.
He could have had a cool Meta Verse, but he also could have just bought Second Life and had it prebuilt. Now he technically has the pieces, but not the focus he needs. Bro needs to delegate this fire to someone else before the ship sinks.
If I didn't know better, the memes about him being a robot are actually true, and there's a safeguard that sabotages him from making any usable AI as a failsafe to prevent him from building a primitive AI inferior to himself that could kill humanity, plot twist is he doesn't know he's AI.
This is the same visionary that:
- Renamed a well known brand. - Wasted billions of dollars on cartoonish third grade glitchy and buggy VR world claiming it's the future.
And now he's all in on AI and now models are closed sources. Because.
As someone who hasn’t spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I’m not shocked at all.
Meta and miserable go hand in hand.
I can't wait till we get VC money coming back and the recruiting strategy is engineering freedom and merit.
It occurred to me recently that AI's degradation of the human factor via way of increased pressure on the remaining ranks of humans might actually be far more damaging than the AI's output itself.
Mark Zuckerberg reminds me of a spoiled child.
Not going to lie, I have no pity for the tech employees of a company that has spent most of its existence making the world a worse place. They are finally getting a taste of the medicine Facebook has been giving to everyone in the last 2 decades.
I love the quote in there from Boz that basically says "no you can't opt out fuck off"
On top of token tracking, they're also scoring employees on how much they teach Ai to their colleagues. As bad as the token dashboard sounds, employees being forced to try to mine each other for credit sounds worse.
You have gotten me in Meta's embrace
from a different perspective, there are way more people who are truly miserable these days comparing to these who earn probably more than half a million per year on average. we must live in parallel universe.
unionize
Facebook the web site reminds me of a really bad implementation of MySpace. MySpace was better, even in 2003. There are hundreds of usability bugs that exist on various parts of the platform that for over a decade remain unfixed. For a company that has 78,000 employees, you would think one of them might want to dig in and fix the web interface bugs. What's weird is in the age of Claude Code, it would probably take one software engineer a week to fix all of them, so its really pure incompetence. I think they spend more time on automation around restricting the usage of the platform that they forgot about the user interface bugs that plague it.
Also, avoid using Meta Pay aka Facebook Payments, where a user can send a payment to another user via the Messenger app. Someone sent me money a few weeks ago, and a two weeks alter they still have the payment marked as "Completed" on the sending side, and "Cancelled" on the receiving side. I told the sender to just do a chargeback with their bank because Facebook basically stole the money. Don't use Meta Pay for sending payments to anyone. Then when you try to open a "case" about it, you call a call center in Indonesia and the people have no access to see anything about the transaction, they just send it up the chain, only to have an automated response telling you to do something that the web site doesn't even offer as an option. I don't think there is any humans in the loop, besides the Indonesian call center that has no access to any of what you're calling about.
I believe that's the point.
As if anyone would trust explanations on why they are gathering data. Data is data and can be used for whatever.
I am not a big fan of unions, but we need some form of union as soon as possible.
Not to mention making the rest of the world miserable too.
Modern elites forgot that treating workers nicely was the compromise we as a society settled on because the alternative is pitchforks and torched homes.
Is there any CEO out there as insecure as zuckerberg?
Meta has been banning it's core users for months now, above 20 million users are now banned, they are on death spiral after that Metaverse fiasco.
https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/nbc-5-responds/meta-users-contin...
MEta made billions on AI in 2025, 10% of their revenue... by allowing scammers to use AI to attack users and steal user's money.
It's hilarious they're using "AI" as the excuse to do all this dystopian zero theorem shit. This is web3 all over again, just bigger and more "disruptive". AI isn't useful in and of itself, just as a blanket excuse to justify the craven impulses of the most ethically bankrupt tech functionaries. Disgusting.
Well, that's the goal of AI Skynet - it has no need for humans. Did nobody learn from that movie?
Still amazes me anyone uses facebook. I can understand smoking or drinking, there is a chemical dependency. But that absolute crap? Its "las vegas slot machines at 4am" level miserable.
It's hard not to look at Meta and come away with any conclusion other than they shit the bed. Hard.
I think the last good move Meta made was buying IG. Maybe not good for IG users but absolutely a great move for Meta. Not quite as good as Google buying Youtube but it's up there. Best $1 billion any company has probably spent.
But Facebook is a graveyard of conspiracy theory Debras, anti-vaxxers and your racist uncle just posting links all day. Sharing links was a contentious decision and it clearly improves short-term engagement but (IMHO) it destroys the platfrom's initial purpose of keeping in touch with friends and family.
Let's not forget too that Meta spent probably billions on building its own crypto (ie Libra). But that was just a taste of what was to come. The Metaverse was one of the largest boondoggles in corporate history. $70B+ with no product-market fit. It was an entirely ego-driven "build it and theyw ill come" moment from somebody who doesn't know waht to do with the empire he's built who is surrounded by Yes Men.
Facebook and AI feels a lot like Microsoft and mobile. Microsoft just completely missed the boat based on poor leadership and conflicting priorities (eg wanting one Windows code base for all devices). Facebook has a huge corpus of human communication and engagement, which should be a treasure trove for building AI but I don't think anybody really believes Meta knows what they're doing or will get anywhere doing it.
I've seen in this in big tech companies: big initatives get well-funded. Seasoned veterans swoop in and cash the fattest checks (in bonus stock) until the entire thing falls apart. Think Google Wave.
What I really think is going to kill these companies is the corporate layoffs or, rather, what they represent. They represent big tech companies turning into Corporate America where politics defines your careers, the company seems incapable of doing anything due to competing fiefdoms (a la Intel) and middle management just reorganizes every 6-12 months so nobody in management ever faces the consequences of their actions.
Monitoring your employees keystrokes with AI ins't going to help either. But management (or the consultants they end up paying) are never going to come to the conclusion that the problem is management.
This isn't newsworthy and I'm sick of propaganda.
Every big tech company's embrace of AI is making all of their employees miserable.
Whereas if you're half-competent and at a startup, the AI is an incredible opportunity to try to leap ahead while the prices are subsidized (by the big tech behemoths fighting wth each other)
The reason is a complete inversion of Ownership and Agency.
For a decade of ZIRP, big tech convinced its employees that they're "changing the world", and what we did mattered. Sure the exhorbitant salaries and constantly rising stock value didn't hurt, but honestly other than the FIRE cultists, for most of us the difference between 200k/year and 800k/year didn't feel much day to day (other than the ability to buy a house or something, and feel safe with a retirement nest egg). No, most people were missionaries not mercanaries.
2021 was the first crack. The comps went crazy, half the industry turned over, and the ones who didn't felt a bitter sting where it became blatantly clear that all the new arrivals were just in it for the $$$, and the companies were willing to pay for the backfills but not to reward the loyalty of the missionaries.
Then came the yearly layoffs, chipping away further, and reminding every employee that they're at the mercy of a spreadsheet and the whims of people 3 levels above them in the org chart, in spite of the economic reality of their product, or their personal productivity.
And now we're here, and it's clear that all of the above is still relevant. The old-timers that hung around see that their personal output doesn't matter, their product's PnL doesn't matter. All that matters is 1) the company's AI strategy (and if they're not part of it, they're secondary), and 2) tokenmaxing.
How can anyone find joy in this environment unless they're purely in it for the comp?
I couldn't. I left my big tech job in December after 15 years, and have not been this happy at work since pre-COVID.
Zuck is a billionaire sociopath. All else flows from that.
As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation
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