Meta Is Preparing to Notify Employees of Large-Scale Layoffs This Week

Re:Meta Is Preparing to Notify Employees of Large-Scale Layo... by ldjkfkdsjnv on Sunday November 06, 2022 @04:50PM (#33497696)

Not quite. Facebook is the pinnacle of memorization. Google is similar and is absolutely not innovating, they just have a monopoly on search, and a bunch of side projects copying other companies (AWS, Microsoft Word) etc. Microsoft does not interview like that, and TikTok is a copy of FB funded by the CCP. Tesla does not ask leetcode hard interview questions. Neither does Amazon. I am intimately familiar with the interview process.

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Re:Meta Is Preparing to Notify Employees of Large-Scale Layo... by pcbro141 on Sunday November 06, 2022 @05:10PM (#33497941)

TikTok is not a copy of Facebook. The fact Facebook/Meta/Instagram is trying desperately to copy them is proof of that.

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Re:Meta Is Preparing to Notify Employees of Large-Scale Layo... by ldjkfkdsjnv on Sunday November 06, 2022 @05:16PM (#33498014)

The algorithm is drastically better, but is also better because TikTok doesnt have as strong as a need for profit. Its a long story, and yes its a good product. But its an incremental algorithmic change, not a new product category

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Re:Meta Is Preparing to Notify Employees of Large-Scale Layo... by hn_throwaway_99 on Sunday November 06, 2022 @07:04PM (#33499172)

TBH I have no idea what you are talking about. There have even been a bunch of articles along the lines of "the social network is dead". That is, Facebook is all about who your friends are and your overall social network. TikTok has none of that - it's about following and finding content that is entertaining, not that an old friend just had a baby.

Heck, a big part of TikTok was Musical.ly, an app for lip syncing videos. That was a huge stroke of luck/foresight because it gave TikTok a lot of the music rights deals they would need to allow people to put videos to music.

Are you really arguing an app around individual videos set to music (which, in my experience, is still the vast majority of TikTok videos) is somehow an "incremental product change" to a friends-based social network?

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Re:Meta Is Preparing to Notify Employees of Large-Scale Layo... by ldjkfkdsjnv on Sunday November 06, 2022 @07:22PM (#33499357)

I'm too busy to explain it. But in short, the facebook/instagram (and youtube) algorithms are built to optimize:

1. Content that is profitable from an advertising perspective

2. Censoring certain content/only showing major/authoritative sources.

TikTok changed that by allowing grass roots content to go viral, which from an algorithmic perspective is less profitable. But that doesnt matter, its backed by the CCP. Theres alot that goes into why tiktok is better, and alot of it is monetary/business related, not computer science.

But beyond that, FB/Google just got lazy and stopped pushing for new things. Wildly successful and presumed monopolies, they left a massive product gap (allowing grass roots content to go viral), which TikTok filled.

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Re:Meta Is Preparing to Notify Employees of Large-Scale Layo... by PaulHoule on Sunday November 06, 2022 @08:26PM (#33499876)

Also TikTok seems to use a multi-armed bandit to balance explore/exploit in a way that previous sites didn't.

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Re:Meta Is Preparing to Notify Employees of Large-Scale Layo... by disgruntledphd2 on Monday November 07, 2022 @03:42AM (#33502988)

TikTok have much better labelled training data, because you need to interact.

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Re:Meta Is Preparing to Notify Employees of Large-Scale Layo... by rvz on Monday November 07, 2022 @01:17AM (#33501846)

Correct. TikTok is a worse version of Facebook, funnelling data back to the CCP (as required), spying on certain individuals physical locations [0] on the platform, and creators are once again working for its algorithm that can dictate what is seen and unseen, for the content to be seen by billions, just like before.

They hype around it is because it is the current thing.

[0] https://futurism.com/tiktok-spy-locations-specific-americans

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Re:Meta Is Preparing to Notify Employees of Large-Scale Layo... by jarsin on Sunday November 06, 2022 @04:59PM (#33497806)

Did amazon change recently? I got leetcoded there. I even applied to a web dev role using ruby on rails and was blindsided by the hard trick questions.

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Re:Meta Is Preparing to Notify Employees of Large-Scale Layo... by dirac44 on Sunday November 06, 2022 @05:49PM (#33498356)

No, the person saying they don't do LC hard questions is not correct. Most are going to be LC medium but they do ask LC hard in some interviews. I can in fact point to two questions I was asked by Amazon in the last few months and I worked there for several years. In any event they are mostly LC medium, possibly LC hard--exactly what you should expect from a FB interview in the past couple of years.

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Re:Meta Is Preparing to Notify Employees of Large-Scale Layo... by flyinglizard on Sunday November 06, 2022 @04:52PM (#33497730)

FB did technical innovation just fine. The problem is with the product, and this is not something that engineers solve.

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Re:Meta Is Preparing to Notify Employees of Large-Scale Layo... by bsaul on Sunday November 06, 2022 @04:58PM (#33497791)

And yet i still think the facebook page sucks tremendously from an engineering pov. It hasn't evolved in years feature wise and yet it still slows to a crawl whenever i launch it.

Totally unimpressed.

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Re:Meta Is Preparing to Notify Employees of Large-Scale Layo... by datavirtue on Sunday November 06, 2022 @07:12PM (#33499262)

I use (try to sometimes) the Facebook lite app on Android. It rarely opens. Just sits there spinning on the logo screen. It has been consistently acting like this for years through several updates of both Android and the app...on various phones. Shrug.

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Re:Meta Is Preparing to Notify Employees of Large-Scale Layo... by ldjkfkdsjnv on Sunday November 06, 2022 @04:56PM (#33497764)

The problem is that it should be something that engineers solve. Non technical product managers from top schools are not equipped to drive innovation if they are not on the technical ground level.

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Re:Meta Is Preparing to Notify Employees of Large-Scale Layo... by kjeetgill on Sunday November 06, 2022 @05:46PM (#33498329)

> TikTok is a copy of FB funded by the CCP.

With all due respect — Facebook (the product) is one of the social platforms furthest from TikTok. Even roughly equating them sounds like you might not use, know, or understand any of them. Vine, YouTube, or Snapchat maybe — they all differ in different ways — or even Insta I get ... But Facebook?

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Re:Meta Is Preparing to Notify Employees of Large-Scale Layo... by partiallypro on Sunday November 06, 2022 @07:54PM (#33499635)

I think he's specifically taking about the algorithm. Tiktok can be friendless, but so can Reels and Youtube. In the end Tiktok is a similar concept to Facebook when you consider that it's catered content.

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Re:Meta Is Preparing to Notify Employees of Large-Scale Layo... by vmladenov on Sunday November 06, 2022 @09:20PM (#33500296)

> Microsoft does not interview like that [...] Neither does Amazon

This is straight up wrong. Both companies ask difficult algorithms questions in their interviews.

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Re:Meta Is Preparing to Notify Employees of Large-Scale Layo... by ren_engineer on Monday November 07, 2022 @01:20AM (#33501868)

"difficult" is relative, MS and Amazon interviews are considered jokes/warmups compared to some of the other places that are basically asking competitive programming questions

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