You have accurately re-stated the situation, yes. I know for a fact that there are teams like that! And what are they going to do now that the scientists who could have helped them make those decisions in a principled way are scattered to different teams or companies? This is the very definition of penny-wise and pound-foolish.
What are they going to do... make poorer decisions? How much poorer? Will it matter?
When a company undertakes cost cutting as a strategic priority, it is usually that they have made overeager long-term bets that turn out to be unsustainable and need correcting. It tends to be short termist.
Real estate analogy. Say I bought a house on a mortgage and I'm fixing it up to resell it. I'm hiring a roofer to fix leaks. That's important long term because it'll save on future repair costs. He gets to work. Then I suddenly have a need for funds for something urgent and unrelated, so I need to make a choice: do I stop paying the mortgage, or the roofer? Probably the roofer. It's still dumb not to fix the leaks. But it's more dumb to get the house repossessed.
When you hit the bottom of your capital reserve (for some definition of "bottom" - Meta is obviously not bankrupt but it cares about its stock price), you end up having to make choices that are really sucky. "Should I cut off your arm, or your leg, sir?" type of choices. Yet they must be made or you circle the drain for a long time before ending up like Yahoo.
IOW I wouldn't see it as a judgement of value of your work. If you're the roofer that's been cut off, it's not because it's bad to fix leaks, or because you don't do a good job at it. It's only because your employer felt like they needed the cash for something else.
I appreciate the sentiment behind your post, but in the future could we all please not conflate "neurodivergent people's difficulties in expressing empathy" with "being a jerk on the internet"?
I've had many gentle, kind, thoughtful and loving friends, classmates and coworkers who have lived with autism, and it's unfair and unkind to compare them to internet trolls. Thanks!
That would be normal, wouldn't it? It's the classic example in The Innovator's Dilemma. The incumbent has a lot of pressures trying to keep it doing what it was doing.
Nor did anything compel you to read it, or post whiny comments here!
I did choose to work for Facebook. The pitch I was given seven years ago was that (1) the mission of the company is to lower costs of building community and connecting people; running an ad-funded social media platform is the means to that end. That's not a mission that is super important to me, but I can respect it. And (2) FB is the company that is investing heavily in advancing modern developer tools outside of the Microsoft ecosystem. That is a mission that is important to me.
Your statement that I wish I could continue to work for and enrich Zuck is false. I was regretted attrition.
I don't think my comments are particularly whiny; that comes across as a "no, you" response. I'll accept callous but I don't wish you harm, in fact I hope you find success and fulfillment in your post-Facebook career.
> Your statement that I wish I could continue to work for and enrich Zuck is false. I was regretted attrition.
Perhaps you should make it more clear in the blog post that you left of your own accord. People who are not familiar with the Facebook org chart might not understand that when you say "My team — Probabilistic Programming Languages — and indeed entire “Probability” division were laid off a couple weeks ago" that you yourself are not included in that set of people who were laid off.
I am very thankful for that opportunity. I learned so much from my colleagues! And they were genuinely great people to work with.
I was well compensated, it's true. It's also true that for every $1000 I was paid, I lowered FB's costs by about $4000. The argument that I should be eternally grateful to Zuck for allowing me to keep a quarter -- before taxes! -- of the profit that accrued to him for writing zero lines of compiler code while he keeps the other three quarters is maybe not the strong argument you think it is.
Why did you work for him if you weren't happy with the arrangement? Surely you had other options. You're one of the most talented people in one of the most highly-paid/profitable fields, one with very few institutional barriers to advancement (licensing, accreditation, educational requirements, etc). You made a bad deal with the devil, and now you're upset about it? You were either willfully ignorant of, or did not care, about the ill effects Facebook has on the world. You just wanted to work on cool tech shit and get paid a lot of money. Why should anyone look at your experience as anything other than a cautionary tale?
Many people, myself included, had a lot of concerns about the products the company was building and their effects on the world. When you work on a team whose mission is to help other teams make better decisions at lower cost, the aim is to look at the whole system and improve the whole thing.
Let me give you an example. Most "this content doesn't belong on FB" decisions are made by ML, but a great many go to human review. Imagine what that job is like. It's emotionally exhausting, it's poorly compensated, burnout is high.
My team had a model in production where we would use Bayesian reasoning to automatically detect when a particular human was likely to have made the correct decision about content classification, and therefore, if two humans disagreed, how to resolve that impasse without getting a third involved. (And in addition we get a lot more information out of the model including bounds on true prevalence of bad content, and so on.)
Does that save the company money? Sure. Millions of dollars a month. (And for the amateur bean counters elsewhere on this page: the data scientist who developed this model is NOT PAID MILLIONS OF DOLLARS A MONTH.) But it also (1) helps keep bad content off of the platform, so users aren't exposed to it, (2) lowers the number of human reviewers who come into contact with it, which is improves their jobs, and (3) frees up budget for whatever improvements need to be made to this whole workflow.
That's just one example; everything that we did was with an eye towards not merely saving the company money, but improving the ability to make good decisions about the products.
I think you've avoided the original commenter's point completely. Facebook is a net negative to society. There is nothing you can do to improve FB products when the primary mission is to be an addictive ad machine.
>But it also (1) helps keep bad content off of the platform, so users aren't exposed to it, (2) lowers the number of human reviewers who come into contact with it, which is improves their jobs, and (3) frees up budget for whatever improvements need to be made to this whole workflow.
I think reading that this type of solution was created, and person who worked on it was laid off, makes me very sad as a Data Scientist.
I enjoy working as a Data Scientist, but I struggle a lot with the field. Lots of jobs are mostly about grabbing eyeballs or selling something. Some jobs are just total bullshit. Even the ones where you're doing something concrete (e.g. keeping a machine running), some days you still wonder if it really matters in the long run.
But with some of these social media safety topics, it can feel like a job has some meaning beyond just shuffling numbers around on an spreadsheet.
So it's disappointing to hear that people with the skills to create something like that are fired.
