Comment by Anon1096
12 days ago
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.
I am not saying mature companies are "YOLO-ing" this randomly, but that many assumptions are made about how the input metrics trickle back to revenue/profits, and those can change. The attribution exists, but how it is done is far from an objective thing. E.g. how do you translate CTR into revenue ? How do you value an additional user ?
This can also be seen with cost saving. There are numerous examples on HN when people wonder why reducing the cost of something by X millions was not recognized (e.g. https://x.com/danluu/status/802971209176477696). Based on my own experience, most likely explanation is that's because there was no item related to this in the financial planning to be recognized.