Comment by cdavid
12 days ago
This article makes the naive assumption that "what is making money" is an objective thing.
Once a company reaches a certain size, basically once it has a financial planning department w/ different VPs owning their PnL, who is making money increasingly becomes a social construct. "how to get promoted" by spakhm is much more closer to how a large, successful org works IMO: https://spakhm.substack.com/p/how-to-get-promoted
I've seen this in my career multiple times. For example, when I was involved in search for some companies, we would demonstrate through A/B testing that we would make X more money per month. Executive team changed, they decided that "A/B test does not work and slows us down", the definition of making money changed, we overnight went from a money-aking org to a cost center.
Nowadays, most companies are pushing GenAI everywhere. Most of those things don't make money, and yet a lot of promotions will be obtained across the board until the tune ends.
Thank you. "Spearheading" is always valued and the way to do it is to leave for some new initiative somewhat before everyone realises the current one is a turd. The blame then attaches to the people left holding the turd.
But still there are objective metrics by which you can track which products are making money and which are not. You can do ALL the financial manipulation to an extent, but everyone above bragging VPs/Directors know which product lines are making money yoy
Say you are meta. You know that a big stream of revenue is ads. You are an engineer working for one of the myriad ML model around feeds, ads click prediction, whatever. Those ML models are in production, and cost a lot of money to maintain / operate. How much you are a cost center or a money maker will depend on a lot of non objective choices.
The essential issue is attribution, which fundamentally requires some choices about how money is actually made. Even when everybody is in good faith, there are reasonable ways to agree. And people are rarely in good faith around those things.
Ads are still bread and butter for Meta. The first to go will be the folks who are in vogue bcoz of cultural reasons, eg. diversity, green, etc. I would even go the extent of saying that a lot of open source maintainers will also be axed, the day Meta stops making ad money and fights for survival. The issue of `attribution` is to be decided at last, when anyway the house is partially burned and the company is fighting for survival. I am talking about the initial phase, where a lot of engineers work on teams that make no monetary/value sense for company and are there, bcoz manager/CEO don't care or are kind(mostly former).
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You have chosen a very very poor example in calling out Meta Ads. I can assure you that the entire org has a massive magnifying glass over it with insane amounts of data analysis, every % change in revenue is absolutely attributable to exactly what group brought it about whether it be DC hardware, ML teams, or backend infra. It is the lifeblood of Meta with many billions flowing through it of course it isn't just being cowboy'd with random changes that have undefined impact on yoy revenue.
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Hadn’t read “how to get promoted” before!
Damn that’s a good read and sadly rings true