this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2023
720 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
59675 readers
3218 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Notable exception which must be mentioned is Facebook/Meta: their AR/VR plan is one gigantic moonshot. Whether it will pay off remains to be seen, and if it doesn't then obviously the thousands of people employed in that division won't be able to find a home in WhatsApp or whatever.
And the most successful company with VR, Valve, pretty much had its day with it and have moved on to other, profitable ventures. It's too expensive to own, even moreso to develop for, and offers nothing fascinating in terms of experience that other multimedia does.
I know they don't do bootcamp any more, but Facebook were perfectly set up to move people between divisions by not hiring for specific roles, and doing team matching over orientation. It was a system that worked well, and being able to switch teams easily meant that people could jump from WhatsApp to Instagram to Ads with minimal friction.
In terms of numbers, definitely, but a phased rollout could work if it meant keeping services in KTLO, and moving people out gradually as you slow down internal hiring. Sadly, companies find it easier to just sack everyone, and then hire again in a few months.
The hiring process for their AR/VR division is also different than it is for the rest of the company - even when the general rule was to hire without a specific role in mind, that was not the case at Reality Labs. But yeah, the big issue is that you can't absorb 10,000 people into the larger organisation that easily even if they were all generalists.