You're phrasing of "could have been a good payday" makes me think about why people pay for software at all. The bread and butter "quick job, get paid" gigs in software were always circumstantial and depended on humans understanding customer needs more than anything, and combining it with their own desires to grow in mastery of their work.
I'm reminded of the 'faster horses' remark from Ford - since AI by design produces what it thinks we are asking for, how will anyone know who to pay for true innovation?
I agree with you. I think that if we're talking about actual reliable problem solving, we have to be discussing robotic / drone systems. Software is as complex as you want to make it, and always has been.
If you are trying to say that it's not just Meta but all tech giants, you have an oddly defensive way to make that point.
Just because the entire industry was doing bad things does not absolve the largest members of the industry from doing bad things. They were leading the charge!
Facebook is forcing people to use Facebook. If there were realistic alternative social network systems that allowed account migration with contacts and messages, Facebook would be dead in the water.
You can't seriously argue that everyone can just drop a mainstream communication tool without acknowledging the lack of replacements.
Putting Meta next to Netflix in terms of moral culpability is in my opinion laughable.
I don't disagree that there are reasons people compromise on things like the morality of their employer - tale as old as society itself. I do disagree that many people like Meta's services - the only things I have seen people like about Meta is Facebook Marketplace (which is really just Craig's List or eBay if you are looking at technical problems) or the Meta Quest VR (which they've since gutted employment wise since the metaverse debacle).
Not only is it a morally bad employer, but it's also not a very good employer overall. They've just got institutional inertia keeping them entrenched, and are trying to buy their way into AI dominance to boot.
It's hard to imagine a tech company with more clear disdain for their employees than Meta. To me, that seems like a recipe for a dead company, but by all means, build your resume and network.
*Edit: people also use Instagram, but the engineering problems with that are also found in newer social networks like Bluesky, with a little less engagement addiction focus.
Here is the problem with the idea of "banning online advertising" - there is a large amount of people who spend a lot of time online. To the point that even small local businesses will buy advertisement space on social media. If such advertising is, it can be assumed social media overall will die, and we will regress back to a world where the previous media incumbents (network television) once again gain all the power.
This is in all likelihood an improvement on just measuring lines of code output, but not at all a silver bullet. I'd imagine this skews heavily towards developers who were around first in large projects. Also skews towards developers who pick certain tasks over others - there's always circumstances where the library you are building on passes breaking changes, etc. but that I feel might be more minor in comparison to the first concern.
I didn't mean to imply there's a single all-encompassing metric or silver bullet, but re-reading, I did kinda write it that way. When you find someone whose code persists a long time, that's often a strong signal of quality contributions. There are of course myriad other ways to contribute critically - ops, culture, finding and fixing hard defects, unusually good understanding of the customer, industry expertise, mentorship, ...
There has to be some language for what you're describing, because I've experienced similar perceptions of people. I've been on both sides of the "you don't actually understand what is being said until years later" discussions as well.
One thing I'd posit is that it might not be the people, but rather an ability or skill people can improve. It takes difficulty and focus and time, but it can be honed. I know this to be true; otherwise I would not be able to understand that which I dismissed years ago!
The problem with this, if it is an active ability rather than a person's inherent traits, is that it becomes impossible to recognize by any identifiable markers. I've often found that some of the most intelligent and "look at the problem from all angles" kind of minds often have very glaring blind spots (look no further than political subjects, for example). These blind spots manifest even in the most generally intelligent thinkers, that's what makes people human after all. So it can be said that good thinking is a very delicate thing, and it can be difficult to recognize against noise no matter who is speaking or what they are discussing.
I'm reminded of the 'faster horses' remark from Ford - since AI by design produces what it thinks we are asking for, how will anyone know who to pay for true innovation?
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