Meta is a cash generating behemoth. They have such a well oiled ad machine that it’s going to be a long time before they destroy themselves. Case in point, they look fine financially even after burning mountains of cash on the Metaverse.
I would worry about Meta dying only when people stop using IG, which they clearly are NOT. IG is firmly entrenched in modern society and culture, they make insane amounts of money off of that.
One thing is becoming more and more clear though, their AI efforts are going nowhere. I would be interested in where they end up in the AI race, they are never going to get as much mindshare as Claude, Codex or Gemini.
Excess verbiage in communication. Design docs, root cause debriefs etc all are clearly AI generated with little thought to whether they are helpful to the reader. They are certainly helpful to the writer as they can just offload it to the AI.
Its hard to discern the kernel of truth that the author is trying to communicate. So much of documentation is now AI generated and rarely does it help in understanding code bases or diagnosing issues in production.
This was my experience at MSFT for the past year or so.
"Helpful to the writer, useless to the reader" is such a good way to put it. The cost just moved downstream. I've started skipping the doc entirely and just reading the code, feels faster at this point
You are not alone. I was in this exact same position at MSFT and I put in my resignation. I am an L63 but the work I was doing, was something an L60-L61 could do and I frequently felt I was in one of those Bullshit jobs (courtesy of David Graeber). I was paid handsomely but once the sign on stock ran out, I saw that I was staying in the job just for security. I felt like one of those Hooli engineers who were sunbathing at the Hooli office terrace waiting for their stocks to vest. I am only 9 years into my career and I didn’t see that as the optimal thing for my career rn.
I didn’t have any major financial obligations like you though, so it was a much simpler decision for me.
Hang in there buddy and also thanks for the deeply human comment.
> I am an L63 but the work I was doing, was something an L60-L61 could do
Maybe the problem is imagining that you need sixty three levels of granularity to describe experience or to establish superiority over sixty two categories of "lesser" engineers?
Have no idea why people here are picking up on MSFT’s levelling system? I didn’t invent it.And it actually starts at L59.
The point I made was that as an SSE (L63), there’s a certain amount of scope and autonomy that is expected neither of which I was getting and hence I resigned. I am not trying to bully or denigrate anyone junior.
The levelling system specifies the output and the characteristics of the output expected out of an engineer, that’s it. Whether I believe in it or not is beside the point, I was in the system so I did believe it otherwise progressing through my career would have been impossible.
>Have no idea why people here are picking up on MSFT’s levelling system? I didn’t invent it.And it actually starts at L59.
Because it's standard arrogance by developers not realizing that Microsoft Level system is actually pay bands and because it was developed in 80s, leveling system COVERS all jobs because pay systems didn't support different pay bands back then. So there are lower levels then 59, for things like janitors, secretaries and others who don't make as much as SWE.
It’s not like the op invented Microsoft’s leveling system. It looks like junior engineer is 59 and 63 is something like senior engineer. I know at google there is a very meaningful difference in the work and responsibilities expected between our equivalent of 63 (L5) and 61(L4).
Believing in that system so much to say something like that might be worse. Noting against the OP, that kind of Stockholm Syndrome can be found in my past as well.
Not sure I understand. Is your contention that the distinction between senior and non-senior engineers is fake and everyone's doing basically the same thing? Or are you just objecting to the (arbitrary) names Microsoft uses for them?
False dichotomy. Of course not everyone has the same experience/skills, but any corporate system of putting individuals to tiers has little to do with experience/skills.
That's just not accurate. I've seen these systems run at multiple companies, and in every case they had a lot to do with skills and experience. It's true that they're not a perfect classification, and I think it's defensible that some people prefer a system where this kind of leveling doesn't happen.
But the tradeoff is that career advancement becomes less legible in a way that other people often find frustrating. Why does Alice get paid 3 times as much as me to work on cooler and more important stuff? "Alice is L7 and I'm L4" is often an easier answer to accept than "Alice is a better engineer than I am" or "People with Alice's experience have more options than I do".
> That's just not accurate. I've seen these systems run at multiple companies, and in every case they had a lot to do with skills and experience
> I am an L63 but the work I was doing, was something an L60-L61 could do
So you and OP believe that, these systems are good indicators of skills, so much that the last statement sounds normal?
I was thinking like that once, as well, but I got disillusioned. These stuff tend to be gamed.
> Why does Alice get paid 3 times as much as me to work on cooler and more important stuff? "Alice is L7 and I'm L4" is often an easier answer to accept than "Alice is a better engineer than I am" or "People with Alice's experience have more options than I do".
Sure, that's why these system exist. They justify pay, that's all there is.
> So you and OP believe that, these systems are good indicators of skills, so much that the last statement sounds normal?
I do. I think it's good not to box people in, where certain work is only for (my company's equivalent of) L63s and an L60 isn't even allowed to try. But when I do see L60s try, they usually need someone to come by and intervene, because there are critical skills that come with seniority that they don't yet have.
To be more concrete, one thing I often notice in junior engineers I mentor is that they're very "task brained". They understand their job to be nothing more than a sequence of development tasks, so they struggle to understand what's happening or how to help when it comes time for important things that aren't tasks. One guy I knew was frustrated that he didn't understand how priorities are set, and yet would never read the customer stories in his email that the company used to set priorities.
> So you and OP believe that, these systems are good indicators of skills, so much that the last statement sounds normal?
Op here, yes I do believe, the levels aren’t perfect though. I believe in them because I was once L60 and L61, I knew intimately what was expected of me then and I can assure you the work I was doing as an L63 could be done by someone few levels down, which is to say I was underutilised. The team was also not the right fit for me.
Levels tell you two things, the scope and autonomy you get in your work and more importantly compensation. From the compensation view point, it does tend to be “gamed” frequently by developers hired from outside who might be out earning devs promoted within.
I think they measure different things. The ladder levels have to do with the type of jobs you can accomplish in a large organization. I actually find they translate reasonably well to nontechnical roles in corporate structures. It is of course tempting to think that good engineers will be high level in those ratings, but that’s really not what is being measured by levels. A certain proficiency is required, but it’s mostly about responsibility and ability to take on tasks of a certain scale or organizational complexity.
All this to say it is absolutely reasonable for the OP to complain that they are being underutilized at the role of senior being given small byte sized projects of for no other reason than that this would prevent future growth.
I learned in my 30s that most of the software profession works on boring projects. Uninteresting, low value code, for a barely-working product, used by customers who don't really care, in a low-stakes market that doesn't reward excellence, rigor, or quality. If you can find the rare company where this isn't the case, go for it!
Here’s my take as an Indian having lived in cities like Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bengaluru
1. No manufacturing expertise in India, we aren’t a manufacturing powerhouse despite having similar levels of population as China. We have always prioritised services. That has an inherent limit.
2. Local governments here are powerless. I don’t have the source for this but only about 3% of public spending is done by local governments at the municipal level. Even for “rich” cities, local governments although are wealthy they are always controlled by whoever has power at the state level. It’s why Indian cities have such decrepit infrastructure vis a vis China.
3. Caste based politics and more recently freebies based politics. Recently, state governments all over India have been all out bribing voters with cash transfers if voted to power. This won’t bode well for long term financial stability. This is also short term thinking at its finest. They have run out of ideas.
4. Weak rule of law. There’s a huge backlog of cases in our justice system right from Supreme Court to the local courts. Doing business in India can backfire in spectacular ways (inordinate tax demands by union government etc).
Entire studies can be done but these are top 4 things keeping India where it is.
Is this course still available? What about the course materials? I know it will be dated but if so can someone pls share the links.
Tried searching for it on google but couldn’t find it.
This matches my experience at MSFT. Very little work for too many people, MSFT CFO also said in the latest earnings calls that MSFT will have fewer people next year than this year, they offered buyouts to tenured people, did layoffs in LinkedIn not sure if there’s more to come.
Think this is the FAANGs entering their stodgy middle life phase like Oracle et al did decades ago. Except for Google they haven't done anything innovative in like a decade. It's time to wring money out of the monopoly and buy companies to add to that.
It’s more nuanced than that. There are lines of business where there is plenty of growth and places where growth has stagnated or business is decelerating.
In the former, you can see some of the products that MSFT is shipping such as MAIA chips, Azure Horizon DB, MSFT Fabric, Sovereign clouds etc. These businesses are seeing steady growth and there’s plenty of work to be done whereas for products like IoT, XBox and anything to do with gaming in general etc you will see that there isn’t much growth left and yet these products have a lot of headcount behind them.
So MSFT isn’t stagnating (revenue keeps increasing). Although there are quite a few businesses within MSFT that can use a lot of headcount reduction, this is my take as a low level L63 grunt.
These businesses didn't stop growing. They grew by how you say. Steady growth into adjacent markets and acquisitions. Not through innovative new products.
It's just a different mindset. It's no longer move fast and be first. It's well we'll get there eventually. Let's do it cost constrained and with minimal risk.
This is the take nobody is ready for!
Everyone is under the illusion that growth is infinite and there are no periods where things jam to a halt and we get stagnation.
There’s a hierarchy amongst knowledge work and AI hasn’t yet been able to do the work that is rare and valuable.
Over the past two decades, there have been lot of solved problems like building boring scalable web apps, UX design etc and AI is fairly good at this, enough so that good prompting can get you very far. This shouldn’t be a surprise, there’s a lot of publicly available data for this (GitHub repos etc).
On the other hand, there are rarer Computer science problems like designing efficient Datacenters, GPUs, DL models. Think about problems that someone of Jeff Dean’s or James Hamilton’s (AWS SVP) or a skilled Computer Architecture researcher like David Paterson’s ability would solve. These are incredibly hard and rare problems and AI hasn’t been able to make much progress in these areas. That’s true for other sciences as well.
If you’re a regular Joe like me who builds boring CRUD apps, AI is coming for you.
What I mean is if you are working on incredibly hard and rare problems that require rare skills and also those problems don’t have publicly available data that LLMs can be trained on, you’re safe from being “automated” away. If not, you must plan accordingly. Also if you’re a skilled manager (in any field) AI cannot replace you, highly skilled managers that can get the best out of their teams have rare skills that aren’t easily replicable even amongst humans much less AI. Although, if going forward we need fewer developers we will need fewer managers too.
> because the reader must now sift the synthetic context for whatever the document was originally about
> time wasted using AI on tasks that did not need it, on artifacts no one will read, on processes that exist only because the tool made it cheap to construct them. On decks that spell out things that previously didn’t even need to be said or were assumed.
I work at MSFT and at-least in my org, this is happening at warp speed. Every document I read, my first thoughts are what is the kernel of the idea that the writer was trying to convey ? Because 95% of the content of the doc is just verbiage. You can always tell its verbiage, the em-dashes, the rhythmic text, the green check mark emoji etc. We are hoping that volume of output will make up for the quality or lack thereof. More markdown files, more AGENTS.md file but is that making us better developers ? It certainly is giving the illusion that we are faster but I don't know how management thinks this will lead to tangible impact on the top line or bottom line.
In my experience, some of the best writing (in design docs and PM specs) at MSFT have been human written. You can see the clarity of purpose from the writer, ithere is no need to read it again, it is equivalent to having a 1-on-1 with the writer themselves. But AI written slop, the less said the better.
This piece hits home, I wonder how the experience is at other Big Tech companies.
I work at MSFT. I can understand the incentives behind this change. Although I am not sure how different GitHub culture is from MSFT.
I am sure they are closely tracking this metric of Copilot authored PRs so that everyone down from Nadella to the dev and PM for this can use it to hype up GH Copilot. It’s also a simple and clean metric that goes well in your Connects (performance discussion), you could say the feature I worked on led to xx million copilot authored PRs and there is now an AI usage mandate and you need to mention how you used AI to do something more efficiently blah blah. It’s good old promotion theatre. I don’t think its unique to MSFT though and is probably common across Big Tech.
There are alternative ways to gather telemetry data about your usage, then literally polluting the commit message / PR description of the author. Why even consider doing that in the first place?
the Microsofties viewing their IBM colleagues as mired in pointless bureaucracy and the IBM folks viewing Microsofties as undisciplined hackers.
I work at MSFT, this made me chuckle hard. Microsoft must have been a very different company back then, because now I find myself and my colleagues mired in pointless bureaucracy via endless meetings, AI mandates, promotion theatre and the list goes on. I am decently paid but the bureaucracy is soul destroying.
I would worry about Meta dying only when people stop using IG, which they clearly are NOT. IG is firmly entrenched in modern society and culture, they make insane amounts of money off of that.
One thing is becoming more and more clear though, their AI efforts are going nowhere. I would be interested in where they end up in the AI race, they are never going to get as much mindshare as Claude, Codex or Gemini.
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