Do not invite big-tech to join your digital autonomy discussion
Bert Hubert:
If we want to discuss how to improve our digital autonomy, employees from US big tech will not usefully contribute to the conversation. They can’t. And in fact, they’ll likely actively prevent progress by restating old talking points, like how (despite tons of legal analysis to the contrary) Microsoft is somehow able to shield us from the vagaries of the US administration.
I recall Microsoft vice-president Brad Smith explaining how Microsoft would go to court to protect European rights and within a week, Microsoft told the International Criminal Court that it had to remove several employees from Microsoft services, because of US sanctions.
Microsoft pointedly did not go to court to defend the ICC.
If you invite US big tech to your event, you’ll spend some of your time listening to fairy tales. And if you are lucky someone is present to debunk these stories. But still, if Amazon just got 10 minutes of speaking time to talk about their supposedly sovereign cloud, and then someone else says it is not true, the meeting is still left with the impression that it could be true. The issue has successfully been “both-sidesed”. Also, you lost 15 minutes of your day.
Tags: amazon microsoft google big-tech digital-sovereignty us-politics europe eu
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Why is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
"For two decades, Meta had a unique, high-performance engineering org; right up until around April of this year. For the first 20 years of the company’s existence, it had a “move-fast-and-break-things” culture, and in the early 2020s this shifted to a “move-fast-with-stable-infra” one. Engineers I know at the company were empowered to do good work, focus on impact, and to balance business interests with solid engineering.
But in the past few weeks, all that has changed, as if the leadership has been following detailed blueprints on how to demolish a proven, successful engineering culture in the most ruthlessly efficient way possible."
This is absolutely crazy stuff. It's amazing how badly-run this sounds! 30-50% of engineers on core engineering teams have been forcefully reassigned to data labeling! AI slop code creating zero-auth password reset security holes! The CISO jumping ship! No wonder everyone's leaving, and pointing fingers at Zuck and Wang.
“It’s literally the gulag,” one of the employees claims. “You have zero purpose in life all of a sudden, you barely interact with anyone, you just have these tasks every week.”
Tags: meta fuckedcompany instagram facebook ai management how-we-work zuck engineering fail