I have great respect for your current work and assurances on the business model. But what you are asserting is only _currently_ in your gift.

If you keep controlling equity stakes in the business and don't need to raise significant outside investment it will work out as per your business model.

If you get into enterprise selling, you'll need a sales workforce and significant cost of Sales/Goods/Administration. If you want only organic growth, you'll be ok. But what will happen is that investment from, or selling to a large corporate, will turbo boost such sales; the temptation proves irresistible to many. If you are in a land-grab dynamics with other companies, growth may actually mean survival.

There is a scalability tier above the best subscription businesses, which is mass-market consumer adoption. The twitter experience demonstrates this. The ad revenue across billions outweighs a tidy subscription revenue from a small highly engaged subscription crowd. Any significant co-investor will find the lure of this irresistible. If you gain private equity investors, you will become ad based with high probability.

I welcome your contribution to the field of messaging apps and wish you well. I hope that this can inform your judgements about business models going forwards. If you think this is incorrect, please follow up with your alternative thoughts.

At the education stage, it is better to optimise for core learning/theory (e.g. mathematical foundations), with a bit of practical stuff thrown in, and then as you go further along, introduce longer projects (more practical work e.g Network Programming) and at the end of the education have "enough" practical experience to make the transition to work (the majority taking this path) where you continue to build the practical experience.

Learning more theory later on is still possible but those are more like financial investments that give lower yields over longer time periods. So they are best done "early" in your personal development.

In terms of interviewing interns, just find out what they do know, and judge the best one on a balance of talent, knowledge and people skills. They will do you proud. No need to have a set expectation against specific skills unless that is the core domain they'll be working on.

India are in discussions with phone vendors to pre-screen the default apps that come on smartphones, and want such apps to be removable. They sight security concerns.

Meta is undergoing a standard phase transition. It was innovation fuelled previously, but now it is value fuelled (milk the existing machine, take care of regulators, be part of the establishment). Intel and IBM are similar examples.

So Zuckerberg, to prevent this, has the right strategy - the pirates inside the organisation strategy. Jobs did this with the Mac project. The question mark really is whether the Metaverse can deliver to take over from the Social Media platforms it has. Even if you accept the promise of Metaverse, according to Carmack the execution has been poor. Normally you just buy your way out with promising startups when execution is poor but the regulators will be heavy with Meta nowadays.

Meta has star power with AI/ML. But on Metaverse there isn't much consumer data to process (yet). So its innovation vector can't be realised.

This effectively means the stars of AI/ML won't help Meta into the future. If they leave, it could be a good thing (if we are taking the value-fuelled hypothesis as their future).

Meta I think will switch to a MBA-led approach to maximise existing value, shed its research aspirations, and switch to hiring the best mechanical/devices/hardware talent it can to improve execution on Metaverse.

Under this appraisal of Meta, broad and wide layoffs, letting the superstars go is the right thing for the company. Unlocked from Meta, those engineers will forge the next great wave of tech companies. The future will be made over the next few months as those start-up fevered ideas will actually get a footing. So I am most hopeful despite the bitter pill of current economic realities. In the short term there is real pain, particularly those relying on visas or the generous healthcare provisions from the company.

Exactly. There is no nice or correct way to do this. Lots of companies seem to go through this and come out fine on the other end as well.

I worked at Nokia through their transition from being the largest smart phone manufacturer in the world to shortly before they sold off what remained of their phone unit to MS, who shut it down completely less than two years later. Basically, that probably affected many tens of thousands of people. I heard all the cliches and was on the receiving end of them. Two points here: 1) this is not personal even if it deeply effects you. 2) if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem. The last point here doesn't mean you are the problem, or the cause of the problem. But simply that your presence is no longer part of any solution to whatever the problem is. Whether you agree with that or not is beside the point. The fact is that, once companies get to this stage, there is only one way forward: let go of a lot of people.

IMHO, Facebook is being to cautious here. They need to cut much more deeply than this and re-focus on their core products and modernize those. Facebook has been dead in the water for years. Whatsapp has an aging user group as well. Instagram seems past its glory. Messenger seems like a failed product at this point. Time to take it out the back and kill that. Revitalizing Facebook and Instagram will require some drastic changes. It's not going to magically start turning around without that. It's either continued gradual decline or finding some way to become relevant again.

I don't disagree with anything you've said here, but I can't help but feel this reads like a monologue from a supervillain who feels righteous in burning the world down because they believe something greater will rise from the ashes.

> The future will be made over the next few months as those start-up fevered ideas will actually get a footing.

The trouble here though, is very few VC's have an appetite to fund now, especially seed / series A. They are too busy dealing with the overpriced and soon to fail cohort from 2020/2021

I spoke with a VC just last week from one if the top five, they are yet to fund anyone new this year.

>Normally you just buy your way out with promising startups when execution is poor

So here's the thing. Who is doing better at this than Meta? Who could they buy? Regulation is a secondary issue.

At this point, the Quests are pretty good gaming machines. Its the software that's lacking. MMAAAN has traditionally struggled with content creation. It took a long time for the streaming studios to get any decent shows. Apple, Google, Netflix and Amazon don't really have a good game portfolio to this day.

They could possibly buy or spin up a bunch of game studios to crank out content but on the hardware side I think they actually are best in class here.

This is a great take on Meta -- in some ways there's an element of macro justice or a return to form in tech and innovation with this shift.

Does AI/ML not unlock value for the Metaverse? Also, the layoffs are set to prioritize recruiting, management, and business personnel. That seems to go against the idea that they are switching to an MBA-led approach.

One thing I can't figure out (genuine question) is why they don't have 20% time anymore for innovation. I thought it was a key driver for new products at Google. Does such a thing cause career risk, or political strife?

Also, I'd like to understand if their AI lab, Deep Mind, also suffers the same problem, or does it have a different culture? Does Deep Mind have 20% time?

I'd appreciate it if anyone within the company could explain it please.

I was at Google from late 2013 to early 2016, and even then, I would hear 20% time referred to as 120% time [1]. So 20% time hasn't been a de facto practice for about a decade.

[1]: https://qz.com/116196/google-engineers-insist-20-time-is-not...

That's a great article. To me it makes painful reading because what it means is that some of the most talented engineers are being hired by Google to do just regular enterprise software stuff, but disincentivised to actually do innovation for which they are most able. If they were back in the open market so many great firms could have been founded, which might be the ultimate corporate strategy for Google - to take talent off the market.

It was always a myth. Back in the day, a few people would have 20% projects. Most did not, or did so only once in a while.

I can only speak from my experience, but:

For the decade that I've been at Google it has always been the case that quite a few people around me had 20% projects. This includes myself, my teammates, people reporting to me, people reporting to someone else doing a 20% project on my team and so on.

"Quite a few" is pretty imprecise. Did you ever do a count?

I did, around 2007: 8 or 9 engineers around a table. Maybe 1 or 2 had a 20%.

The corporate environment demands results every quarter, so everyone who cares about career must show measurable progress every 3 months. That's why the corporate crowd looks like a bunch of blind men with walking sticks, looking down precisely 3 feet ahead. They are the type that will walk thru an amazon forest, and their only memories will be mud and potholes on their way.

If I'm understanding it correctly, you are saying doing 20% time on a side project is a career risk as you won't be seen to be "delivering" as much as your peers (because the side project is not valued).

Is it even worse than that - you get rooted out because innovation side projects marks you out as being troublesome (as it does not align with corporate plans/goals)?

Caveat that I don't know what I'm talking about, but maybe 20% time violates the inclusiveness value because it doesn't require/include others' opinions:

> “Respect each other” is translated into “find a way to include and agree with every person’s opinion”. In an inclusive culture (good —it doesn’t withhold information and opportunity) with very distributed ownership (bad), you rapidly get to needing approval from many people before any decision can be made.

The only person whose opinion 20% time, as prescribed, does not value, is your manager's. (As they shouldn't be able to veto it.) Your 20% project is not going to get anything done if you're not taking the opinions of your collaborators/dependencies/customers into account.

IMO, The reason most people don't pursue 20% projects is because it's hard to be the manager, product manager, and main developer on a project that you're giving 1 day a week to. It's really, really hard. Most people don't have the skillset to do that well.

So the path of least resistance to a simple life is to just devote 100% of your time to what your manager wants you to work on, where its her job to manage, product manage/wrangle product managers, etc.

The UK/IE market is skewed due to the legislation that essentially ignores intermediaries and considers whether a freelancer is under management supervision and control, in effect an employee (using an unfavourable tax definition of such working practices). The poison pill is the end hirer is passed liability for ensuring the worker is classed properly for tax. The game dynamics that result is that any large corporation cannot hire freelancers directly anymore for 'knowledge worker' type jobs as the taxman would just do a bulk audit and penalise in one go (rather than in the old days of individually pursuing contractors separately which is not scaleable).

So freelancing only is a reality if you just serve small companies; e.g. do word press and web site updates for a bunch of local businesses, and other ad hoc tech support type work. Big money contracts with large corporations is all done via service provider companies paying contractors through Umbrella or on their payroll.

Interesting, wonder how this situation applies to the US? Some states have similar laws. I know of one case where a contractor that should be an employee is working ultimately for Uncle Sam in such a state.

I imagine it's less of a pressing issue in the US. In the UK, people who are sole traders/true freelancers don't have to pay the same taxes that employers have to pay on salaries (a class of 'national insurance', essentially a form of payroll tax). In this way, sole traders/freelancers are sometimes painted by the media as "avoiding tax" and the tax authorities much prefer to get people in as employees where possible as they raise more funds. In the US, I believe there is a specific "self employment tax" to cover this problem, so I imagine the IRS doesn't care as much.

Note that the tax laws in Ireland are quite different from the UK. There's not really much tax benefit from being a contractor versus an employee.

Have you heard of California's AB5? Essentially destroyed the freelancer/contractor market in CA.

That's not really true; AB 2257, passed later, fixed some important issues with section 2776.

> Have you heard of California’s AB5? Essentially destroyed the freelancer/contractor market in CA.

AB5 (2019) added a bunch of exceptions allowing contractor designations to rules restricting designation of employees as “contractors” resulting from the California Supreme Court’s application of pre-existing law; either the court decision “destroyed the freelance/contractor market” or nothing did, since what AB5 did was loosen the rules.

Software contractors were not included in the exceptions to my knowledge.

To address your sibling comment, you will have trouble if the contractors work is directed, which it often is.

To address the grand parent, yes I'm aware of it and why I made the post. The work continues in spite of the law. Another wrinkle is Uncle Sam being the plaintiff. Should ask on Lawyer News I guess.

(Am limited to a few comments per hour, so need to conserve them.)

> Software contractors were not included in the exceptions to my knowledge.

Software contractors don’t have their own special exception, but would often fall within the Business Service Provider exception; some software contractoes (web designers hired through referral agencies, specifically) would fall into the exceptions for certain workers hired through referral agencies.

And, of course, because of the Supremacy Clause, direct relations with the federal government are not governed by state labor laws, in any case.

Not true, the Dynamex ruling was only applicable to wage orders by the Industrial Welfare Commission, and AB5 expanded the applicability to other aspects of labor law.

When I started out one of my first jobs came with an on-call pager. It was a puck shaped item that you carried on your belt. When sitting on the toilet it would slide out of its carrier and fall into the basin. Nearly happened twice to me (I caught it). Several others had it fall in. It had to be vigorously cleaned before hand over to the next engineer. That is what is called a "Clean Handover".

So this is what they were talking about when they said "shitty team culture"

It reminds me of: "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" which describes the Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as: "A bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes."

I understand that Twitter no longer employs a comms team, so no comms on that particular issue. But... has the revolution come?

It's is a ruse from the communication dept. They are inciting the revolution all that time.

I was also at the same juncture and found the 'The Personal MBA' Josh Kaufman book highly valuable. Because this book is an index book. Each couple of pages is the distilled top level wisdom/knowledge of a separate business domain. If that section takes your attention it provides a curated book list for digging in deeper.

So you just read the entire book for a wide-but-shallow understanding, and then drill in to topics that interest you most.

Getting into the business domain is firstly an issue of awareness. Once you have an awareness of the landscape you build your knowledge bit by bit.

For me it was obvious that sales was my weakest area, so I focussed on that with further reading and practice. (Turned out I was quite good at it in the end - a total shock to me as I am the nerdy techie type personality).

I've got a couple of life hacks that have seen me through things quite well: 1. My short term goals are: good quality sleep (8hrs), daily exercise (30 minute walk), proper healthy good meals 3 times a day. 2. Work intensely for 40 hours a week. Then switch off, and then have a could not care less attitude until you next return.

Most work environments will recognise the discipline and reliable work ethic and will leave you alone. Some environments will measure you by hours-attendance and will push you out or criticise your work methods. These are not healthy places.

Anecdote: I was learning about climbing and the instructor showed us a thin climbing rope chord (emergency back up). He explained it was plenty to carry your weight but comically thin. What might appear that it "would never work" sometimes can work. Hence my above advice to others.