Posted by spenvo 7/1/2025
Job market forces working as they should.
Unfortunately, productive research doesn't necessarily improve with increased cash-burn rates. As many international post docs simply refuse to travel into the US these days for "reasons". =3
"The CEO and the Three Envelopes" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38725206 )
If you've ever browsed teamblind.com (which I strongly recommend against as I hate that site), you'll see what the people who work at Meta are like.
Is there a particular reason to hate it (aside from it being social media)?
For example unlike HN you don’t often do technical discussions on blind, by design. So it is a “meta”-level strategy discussion of the job, then it skews politics, gossips, stock price etc..
This is compounded by it being social media, where negativity can be amplified 5-10x.
I actually really like tech - the problems we get to work on, the ever-changing technological landscape, the smart and passionate people, etc, etc. But teamblind is just filled with cynical, wealth-obsessed and mean careerists. It's like the opposite of HN in many ways.
And if you ever wondered where the phrase "TC or GTFO" originated... it's from teamblind.
All these articles and videos of people "slamming" each other; it doesn't move the needle, and it's not really news.
But then again, maybe they have such a menagerie of individuals with their heads in the clouds that they've created something of an echo chamber about the 'pure vision' that only they can manifest.
He's certainly trying with statements like this.
To be fair, he's hardly alone. Business is built on dupers and dupees. The duper talks about how important the mission of the business is while taking the value of the labor of the dupee. If he had to work for the money he pays the dupee, he would be a lot less interested in the mission.
In the end, this is the same back and forth that Apple and Sun shared in the late 90s or Meta and Google in 2014. We could have made non-competes illegal today but we didn’t.
A federal rule would be nice, but the state rule where a lot of the development happens could be sufficient.
Mercenaries by definition select for individual dollar outcomes, and its impossible for that not to impact the way they operate in groups, which is generally to the group's detriment unless management is incredibly good at building group-first incentive structures that don't stomp individual outcomes.
That said, mercenary-missionaries are definitely a thing. They're unstoppable forces culturally and economically, and that could be who we're seeing move around here.