This is a rage bait headline for the masses who don’t understand what it means to have a work-issued phone.

As I have one for work which is not my personal phone. And it is totally enterprise-managed so they put whatever apps they want on it and block anything they want. It’s their phone essentially. This headline seems like a nothingburger to me.

It’s not.

What I meant was you can dismiss people for poor performance, but that’s the only valid reason. You cannot lay people off in Japan in the sense of “we cut the budget and decided we don’t want to employ you anymore.”

However, that said… if you want to lay someone off, you can jump through a million hoops. I have seen people relegated to ridiculously inappropriate roles to convince them to leave. You can also mess with non-salary compensation if you want. And you can offer generous severance. And maybe you can convince people to let you “lay them off.”

Sure, transactional SEM either works or it doesn’t and you know if it does. Brand marketing and advertising is a completely different ballgame. Being at the top of the searches when people are buying your product type is one thing. Buying a Super Bowl ad is another.

I knew more than many that worked there, just by actually reading their terms, and understand the mindset behind them.

Yeah okay, guy. You know more about it than people with direct experience. In fact their direct experience only clouds their minds!

You have a dangerous kind of arrogance. The kind that makes you think you know what’s best for others more than they do just by your piercing insight.

You also patently don’t understand how to read a TOS. They are by design incredibly over-reaching and self-interested to the exclusion of the rights of others. This is a legal fiction they reserve in advance so that no matter the eventuality, they can claim you agreed to it. It represents the uttermost limit of what they can imagine. Not the center of gravity of what it’s like to work there.

Anyway, I don’t need to hear more about how your insight penetrates the world from the comfort of your chair.

Let’s just define all the degrees of knowing anything:

1. you have used Facebook.com and read a bunch of headlines about Mark Zuckerberg (this is 99.9% of people and certainly almost everyone in this thread).
2. you work in the same industry as Facebook so you hear things and have some frame of reference for them
3. you work in the same industry and have actual friends who work there
4. you work in the same industry and have friends who work there and have visited on site
5. you have worked there yourself for a brief time
6. you have worked there for a long time
7. you have worked there for a long time and other places in the same industry so you have a frame of reference

So yeah. I’m not a #7, just a #4, but this is a few degrees past #1

But my point is not to argue that I know so much, just that the vast majority of people who think they can see everything from a million miles away are full of shit. They don’t know what they don’t know. I don’t know everything, but I at least have a sense of how much most people don’t know.

We went through that phase. A couple of vibe-coding douchenozzles had our management convinced that everyone can ship code now. They launched a whole initiative to get product managers and UX designers deploying. It failed. Then they dialed it back to “cosmetic fixes only” that aren’t worth an engineer’s time. Now they realize that having uneducated PMs using AI to ship code is actually slower than that PM asking an engineer to use AI to ship code. So we’re back to having distinct functions again. All that really matters is that someone in the chain is using AI to accelerate the process, and the engineers turn out to be so much better at it than anyone else that we now just let them work.

What you said is fine for people learning, but there’s nothing wrong with having AI do something for you when you’ve done it a hundred times and don’t want to do it again. Some of us are actually out here working, not just learning.

I know. My weakness isn’t necessarily waiting time, but time spent on dull work like housework. My brains starts going “BOORRING!”

I don’t doubt that in some situations, when everything else is primed - the product is good, the market is there, and awareness is the only thing lacking - advertising can make a difference.

For every anecdote like your friend’s, though, I can produce a hundred where millions just went into a hole for absolutely nothing.

You just passionately restated the exact misconception I described. Okay, I guess.

I got a lot of garbage when I didn’t know what I was doing and just tried AI once or twice a week with lazy prompts, expecting perfection without iterations. I’d huff and crow about how I had to fix things, whereas now I just tell it what to fix, or even better how to get it right the first time. I’ve built up my library of skills and prompts and refined them quite a bit. The models keep getting smarter. You should really look at your tools and methods - sounds like you’re stuck in 2024.

I didn’t read this as “people who like it in some situations being forced to use it in other situations,” but rather people who are against it as a whole being forced to use it at all. And yeah those folks are going to have a bad time, and won’t be in their jobs long. Just facts.

For those of us on the outside looking in, 99% of what we see is Zuckerberg and we hate him and we think oh well anyone who works for him must be a miserable asshole. But Meta is a big place where some ~70,000 people work, and their experience of working there is not actually 99% made up of tossing Mark’s salad. I’m sure some parts of the company are better to work for and some are worse. A lot of people there have a great experience most of the time. When I’ve visited the campus it has had high energy and it comes across as a place where a huge number of very smart, high achieving young people have been assembled all together, with more money than god has behind them to build the next big thing. To somehow turn all of that bad is actually noteworthy.

It exists. I’m unconvinced that it’s “important.”

Internet advertising has taught us a lot. Every single part of it is trackable so you can see what value you’re getting from it. And that value is tiny. This is why internet ads are a mess. It’s a fuck-shit stack of deceptive trash because that’s the only thing that can actually bring home a fraction of a penny. Display ads are like chemical suits: they do nothing!

I said it was effective at cranking out software, not at training the next generation of engineers. However obviously the terms of engineering are changing so it would also be a mistake to automatically think we should train them exactly as we did before. Some people saw compilers as the same thing: it’s an abstraction layer! How is anyone going to know what’s actually happening in the CPU anymore?! Well, they don’t actually need to.

Christ I hate these people. I work with a guy who constantly says “You gonna tell me marketing and branding doesn’t matter? Apple is the most valuable company in the world!”

Like that makes ANY sense…

It’s getting really bad. The software engineers I work with have been telling me that they now have their coding agents running 24/7 and it sucks for them because they never really clock out anymore. They know that if they don’t periodically check in and set the agent on to the next task, or solve some glitch, that it will only sit there for 8 hours until they come in next day and deal with it, and then they’ve lost that 8 hours. They’re able to do a lot with AI but it is not always fast. So they feel pressure to babysit their AI task flows all the time.

My thought was Jesus Christ what kind of energy is it consuming for these things to be running like that nonstop. I’ve stopped myself from using AI to look up one fact because it would be a waste of energy. But these guys have agents running agents running agents and they’re just crunching and crunching constantly.

It’s effective in terms of cranking out software. I’m talking about skilled senior engineers managing this directly. They know what they’re about. But at what cost?

So many people are already functionally hooked up, even if it is happening through their eyes and not a direct wire. Prove me wrong, everybody: don’t touch any of your devices for a week. It’s nigh unthinkable now but I remember times when the internet didn’t exist, cell phones didn’t exist, I had no cable TV, no game console, and would only turn on my little black and white Mac to write a paper for school. We listened to music a lot, socialized in person, smoked a lot of… various things, had a lot of sex. It’s a rather poor trade we’ve made if you ask me.

Japan. Layoffs are extremely difficult to pull off there. You have to show poor performance by the individual involved, and the standards for that are very rigorous. The government knows that unemployed people immediately become their problem, so they just demand that if a corporation wants to employ someone, they have to be willing to enter into that in an open ended arrangement. So unions aren’t the only way.