Work morale and where do we go from here
Oh boi, oh boi. What is going on? As a preface to this piece, I think we all know that most people hate their job and it’s just something you do. Joanna (Jennifer Aniston) told us all in Office Space. Despite this, I have heard stories of people who were from good families, got a degree from a prestigious university (e.g. Oxford University) and found genuinely interesting work that they liked (in one of the cases, being the food engineer for McDonald’s). So I would say it is fair to say that work that one finds fulfilling is generally believed to exist, but it’s only for the cream of the crop. To paint the full picture here, Adam Savage said that even the best job imaginable (he used the example of a lion tamer), mostly it will still be mostly mundane work (in his example he said that the majority of the time you will be shoveling lion crap) [source: trust me bro, even if I hunt down the video, I won’t be polluting the piece with another quote]. That being said, what is going on in 2026 and beyond?
Traditionally, in tech you wanna work at FAANG. There has been news from “F” that I heard covered by Primeagen. And it leaves me wondering. The reason for me being confused is: People at this very company are supposed to be the cream of the crop, that have friends that hang out with them at lakes on boats where noodle salad is served. Like Mr. Udall (Jack Nicholson) told us in As Good as It Gets. But how do these people feel in 2026?
Employees describe being forced into the group with no real choice: join or quit. Many call themselves “draftees.” Their assigned work? Generating puzzles and coding problems to train AI models. “It’s literally the gulag,” one employee told Wired. “Most people find the work soul-crushing,” said another.
Wow. First, let’s get the unrelated subject out of the way. We are at a point with AI, that the only way to improve it, is to get more training material - specifically higher quality training material. This is what these draftees are doing - creating annotated coding challenges, to train AI. Now, since this is not the focus of this piece, I will leave the implications as homework for the curious reader. But second, I just finished a piece, where I was talking about being peeved with Americans calling everything non-American communist. Now, here we see Americans in the best jobs imaginable, that report being treated as if they were living under Joseph Stalin. I’d like to ask, what can I do, to not end up in such a situation? Generally the advice is: git gud. But here we see thousands (!) of the best people (according to the article, they do it in-house, because Facebook engineers are more intelligent than contractors) being forced to work. Let me reiterate. Generally, the sentiment is that the better you get, the more options you have. But we can clearly see, that the best people are being given Hobson’s choice, where they are either subjected to a gulag, or they cannot work for the company anymore. This is why I’m seemingly cynical. I can clearly see that the world is broken, but people still tell me it’s not.
I’m not sure if I can spell out the idea further. If you don’t get it, you probably can’t get it. And while I am not the kinda guy who searches for the happy middle ground or gives false hope or whatever, I would still like to ask, can an individual do something about their situation in 2026, since the generally available advice is obsolete at best? Now, despite what you might think of me, I’d say yes. But you might not like it. I know I don’t. There’s a book titled “So Good They Can’t Ignore You”. I haven’t read it, so this is not about the book. Now, in the context of this piece, this seems like the old-fashioned advice that gets you into the gulag at Facebook. If I wrote a spiritual successor for the book, I’d call it “So Good You Can Ignore Them”.
Okay, what do I mean? This last bit will be a riff on Jonathan Blow’s hiring rant on stream. Somebody said in the chat that Jon doesn’t hire passionate people. Just think about this for a second. I know that most of us are employees, but you guys can still imagine being a CEO or at least a hiring manager, right? If you post a role and you get to interview everyone, why would you not choose the best person for the job? My point is, the question is contradictory, because clearly the business would hire the person who will contribute the most. But bad questions sometimes lead to interesting answers to completely different questions. Jon invites the chat to think of the best programmer that they can think of. John Carmack is given as an example.
Let’s stop right there. Man, don’t you love it when worlds collide? I can’t be bothered to give you a rundown of John’s career, but at some point, he did get hired, and the employer was nobody else but Facebook, the cornerstone of today’s piece. Now, so it’s not lost in the ether of the endless internet, we’re gonna mirror his FB post from 17th December 2022:
I resigned from my position as an executive consultant for VR with Meta. My internal post to the company got leaked to the press, but that just results in them picking a few choice bits out of it. Here is the full post, just as the internal employees saw it:
This is the end of my decade in VR.
I have mixed feelings.
Quest 2 is almost exactly what I wanted to see from the beginning – mobile hardware, inside out tracking, optional PC streaming, 4k (ish) screen, cost effective. Despite all the complaints I have about our software, millions of people are still getting value out of it. We have a good product. It is successful, and successful products make the world a better place. It all could have happened a bit faster and been going better if different decisions had been made, but we built something pretty close to The Right Thing.
The issue is our efficiency.
Some will ask why I care how the progress is happening, as long as it is happening?
If I am trying to sway others, I would say that an org that has only known inefficiency is ill prepared for the inevitable competition and/or belt tightening, but really, it is the more personal pain of seeing a 5% GPU utilization number in production. I am offended by it.
[edit: I was being overly poetic here, as several people have missed the intention. As a systems optimization person, I care deeply about efficiency. When you work hard at optimization for most of your life, seeing something that is grossly inefficient hurts your soul. I was likening observing our organization’s performance to seeing a tragically low number on a profiling tool.]
We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort. There is no way to sugar coat this; I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy. Some may scoff and contend we are doing just fine, but others will laugh and say “Half? Ha! I’m at quarter efficiency!”
It has been a struggle for me. I have a voice at the highest levels here, so it feels like I should be able to move things, but I’m evidently not persuasive enough. A good fraction of the things I complain about eventually turn my way after a year or two passes and evidence piles up, but I have never been able to kill stupid things before they cause damage, or set a direction and have a team actually stick to it. I think my influence at the margins has been positive, but it has never been a prime mover.
This was admittedly self-inflicted – I could have moved to Menlo Park after the Oculus acquisition and tried to wage battles with generations of leadership, but I was busy programming, and I assumed I would hate it, be bad at it, and probably lose anyway.
Enough complaining. I wearied of the fight and have my own startup to run, but the fight is still winnable! VR can bring value to most of the people in the world, and no company is better positioned to do it than Meta. Maybe it actually is possible to get there by just plowing ahead with current practices, but there is plenty of room for improvement.
Make better decisions and fill your products with “Give a Damn”!
John Carmack, 17th December 2022
Okay, now that we see how the actually good programmers feel working for Facebook and by extension, how employable (hint, this is the keyword!) they are, let’s go back to Jon. He proposes an experiment that the chat should go and hire John Carmack to work on their project. Guess what, John is not available for you. He simply won’t care. What can you offer him? A salary? That won’t cut it, the dude is set for life. I’m not gonna dig into the actual history, but it would seem to me that he only accepted the job at Facebook because they promised him he could work on VR. Did they allow him to work on VR? No, so he left. And I would imagine that after this experience, he would not even consider any offer from any company to work on stuff he’s interested in, as he now knows exactly how that plays out.
Jon then invites the chat to come back and tell the tale of how this hiring of John Carmack went. He then says, that people who are able to do stuff, are doing it on their own. He even quips (making my point here): “You can’t hire me!” Indeed, Jon Blow is not for hire. You simply can’t hire him. Because if you open a position, he won’t apply. And if you reach out to him with a job offer, if he entertains you at all, he’ll politely decline, as he’s busy working on his own projects.
So, this is my advice. Get so good you can ignore them. It’s hard, but it’s the only alternative to the gulag. And honestly, while it is genuinely hard, I don’t think it’s as hard as it sounds. You see the companies are hiring talent to prevent the talent from being productive. There are many sources for this, but let’s go with some random piece I found, where this is described at length. In other words, it is another misconception, that hard work pays. What pays, is getting good and then you get paid for not doing what you’re good at. And as the linked article closes: “Eventually, [the exceptional engineers who are paid to do nothing] get tired and want to go get real work.”
Wait, I didn’t expand on the “not that hard” aspect of the situation. The thing is, because hardly anybody works to solve actual real problems, it gives anyone an opportunity to do just that. And man, linking videos is hairy, because they are harder to follow than text, but I can’t resist. NeetCode recently published a video titled “I don’t like Programming”, where he says that he made a series of videos teaching L33t code. He was just a dude, probably from a good family, but still. Guess what, because his work was exceptionally good, he interviewed at Google on that basis and got a job. And what a job! Based on his description I wouldn’t class him as a “rest and vest” engineer, but he hated the job and didn’t even do it. As this was pre-LLM, he was solving his work assignments with StackOverflow and he hated it. And because it was unbearable, he eventually quit. While I don’t know what he does for a living nowadays, I suspect he can leverage his YouTube channel with 1M+ subscribers.
So, there you have it. As long as you do actual work, you can succeed. But not through employment, because the second you land that position, the company that hired you will stifle your mojo, because they don’t want you to succeed, they want the company to succeed. You can get the paycheque, if you want, but you can’t use your skills in return. This is the cold hard truth of the matter.
Finally, I doubt anyone at Facebook will read this, but I’d like to suggest that you guys have to put your knowledge, experience and reportedly high IQ (as reported by your employer) where your mouth is and take the sack. If you’re so good, surely you can make a living in some other way. Surely, in the so-called “first world”, the best engineers can make a dignified living. Because my background was less fortunate, many will say I am just mean because I’m envious, but the first thing that people tell me is that the world is unfair. Well, my gulag-bound friends, life is unfair not only for the guy who has to put the fries in the bag (lil’ bro), but also for the best American engineers. And ultimately, while on my last rewatch I saw how corny the movie is, there’s a quote from Kingdom of Heaven that I will adopt here:
“Facebook may move an engineer. A paycheck may claim a draftee. That engineer can also move himself, and only then do they truly begin their own game. Remember that howsoever you are played, or by whom… your soul is in your keeping alone. Even though those who presume to play you be CEOs or men of power. When you stand before God, you cannot say, ‘but I was told by others to do thus,’ or that having virtue was not convenient at the time. This will not suffice. Remember that.”