They have power, but it’s not actually legal. Congress has mandated funds for this array, the administration wants to cripple it beyond repair before any legal action can catch up.
Congress could stop it right now if they wanted to. They don't want to stop it. Authoritarian government requires a strong executive and a weak legislature.
This seems to be a case of administration impounding funds authorized by Congress for this purpose. As in they’re just spending what Congress told them to.
And unfortunately SCOTUS made it harder for private groups to sue over impounding. And seems to argue only the GAOs comptroller can sue under the impoundments control act (ICA). GAO is the part of Congress that investigates when executive branch isn’t enforcing the law / spending funds. But have themselves limited ability to enforce anything.
It’s another post watergate reform eroded by Trump II. The ICA was created to stop these sorts of impoundments that happens with Nixon and earlier.
Notably members of Congress are working to pause the dismantling
If you get a FAANG job you need to think like a professional athlete. Save most of what you make. Assume it’s not going to last.
Do NOT have an expectation that this is “normal” income. You’ll probably end up destroying your integrity or doing tons of BS work just to do anything to maintain that level of income.
Expect the norm to be a startup, non tech company, or some other non FAANG big tech corp.
> If you get a FAANG job you need to think like a professional athlete. S
This is what Netflix has always been advocating for. Reid Hoffman also wrote the book The Alliance, in which he argues that employees and employers are allies. When they are aligned, they work together. When not, they part ways.
I find that these two views are realistic and we can use them to guide our actions.
I just realized that Netflix’s Reed Hastings is the same Reed
Hastings that wrote Purify - the excellent memory leak tool that was a pretty big deal back in the 90’s.
I don't think this is really true, there are plenty of engineers/managers who rotate through major tech companies. Many Meta folks will head off to new companies which would pay at similar levels.
I have a friend that did that, in a 4y stint there, and was happy to get to one of the layoffs phase. He was fairly lucky with the stock price RSUs vs stock price(though he knew a few that were so lucky that their 100k RSUs grant at sign got to like 800k, not that lucky, but yeah, his 4 years of flying to office made him basically "I can retire whenever I please to".
Most of developers don't understand what opportunity they got into to be highly paid eng with RSUs. My friend is managing 500 people in a factory and gets salary that everyone would laugh at here...
You can sell your house and roll the equity over to another one in a cheaper area. Depending on how you do it, you might even move into one with no loan or a tiny loan.
This really isn't true. I'm nothing special and have survived in the FAANG world for going on two decades. Excepting the very new in their careers, nearly everyone on my team has managed good length careers at the various FANNGS, possibly with stops at smaller companies.
It was the startups prior to those that were terribly unstable and where you couldn't be sure your badge would open the door when you came to work.
Meta may be a dumpster fire today, and the others have had bad layoffs, true. But they all have huge headcounts, and median employee tenure that is above average in the industry.
Of course, saving for catastrophe is wise, especially in these times, but that's true no matter if you work for a FAANG or a startup.
Pretty sure you can look at the median tenure and it's not long at most FAANGs. Most people who work there do not make it long. There are plenty who are there that do, but that's survivorship bias.
Yes those are stable businesses, but we’re probably at peak social media. They need something new to be interesting in long term investment.
Zuck IMO doesn’t have the halo Musk has where there’s results mixed in with the BS. And Meta doesn’t seem to have a good track record of developing new products.
Is a rage bait machine currently at / near its peak of usage still an interesting investment in 2026?
I think it says more about Metas inability to create new products or make investments.
Look at their big growth areas. They acquired instagram and WhatsApp. Threads seems successful(?) but is an extension of instagram.
Mostly they’ve just gotten better at weaponizing rage bait. Which I’d argue, long term, will be a losing strategy.
If this were a healthy culture, with all the people working there, Zuck would have promoted far more interesting internal experiment to full blown products. That just doesn’t seem to happen there.
The advertisements within Instagram for Threads almost always seem to be fairly thinly disguised engagement & rage bait. Every time it gets me, I feel an increasing desire to move away from the whole ecosystem.
> Zuck would have promoted far more interesting internal experiment to full blown products. That just doesn’t seem to happen there
I don't understand this either, there are so many clearly advantageous ideas and experiments to be be carried out, that can make discussions better, thinking clearer and help people actually connect. But instead they're only thinking about how to optimize the ad-machine in the end, so depressing to see.
> Also their AI efforts and metaverse efforts flopped
That's the thing right
So I was research so both metaverse and AI adjacent. FAIR was industry leading, just not in the sexy field of LLM. FAIR was passed around like a joint at a student house, finally landing under Cox for "product". But FAIR is a research org, so it was a bad fit, run by an even worse leader. (why can't you deliver a new industry leading LLM in 5 weeks? or some other stupid shit)
The metaverse flopped because there was no clear leadership over features/user experience/hardware. Hardware has a 2-4 year lead time. This means that you need to plan your features 5 years in advance. The average horizon for any software feature in oculus was like 4 months.
Because of the huge influx of non game/graphics/hardware engineers the same mistake about "oh lets build a x but for oculus" happened every year. When I left they had contracted a company to re-make unity but for horizon. At the same time they were also making a blender clone, but in react or some stupid shitty idea.
At no point was there a comprehensive plan for what the UX should be like. there were lots of plans that people made, posted about, got many likes. Lots of redesigns of the button, new social features, avatars etc.
Carmak kept on banging on about time to fun, but he never managed to actually make that work. So a social company with a massive social graph, has a product where you can't easily join your friends in a game. (that might of changed, they revoked all my games when I left so I haven't logged in.)
But your point right, in all the years threads is the only new product they have launched, and that only happend by accident.
Meta's SOP is basically have an idea that gets zuck hard, do a small PoC, it shows promise, scale the team from 10 to 3000, and don't deliver anything.
The labelling I don't think is an attrition thing, I think its doing standard facebook shit, throw people at the problem, without thinking about how that would work
I am happy to pay OpenAI for a cheaper model a few generations behind. But they deprecate models aggressively. They push you to bigger and smarter models, when 95% of my work doesn’t need it.
I’d love it if model providers just let old models run and let us pay less, but the deprecation makes me want to look into local models.
Ok if I’m bored I’ll be talking about fun things to do with colleagues. If only for bragging rights, impressing friends, or hacker news upvotes. My time is limited so, I’d need to be careful about how I allocate that resource to projects.
That’s still an economy as it works to distribute limited resources (human time) at a bare minimum.
I’m in an interesting position because I’m fine, but my wife has struggled to find work. I personally have no problem finding work, she applies and applies and seems to get nowhere.
The main difference comes down to networking. Frustrating for me, because I see what’s she’s doing wrong, but can’t lecture her on a style that doesn’t come natural to her.
Basically I don’t ever apply for jobs, yet I find work. She applies through the normal path and never gets called for an interview.
What’s my magic trick? Nothing really slimy, or even pushy, but 100% focused on informal relationships instead of formal channels of work.
I just spend a lot of time connecting with colleagues, catching up with them, and just trying to be friends. I’m not trying to milk them for work. The lunch I have isn’t transactional. We literally barely talk about work.
But because we enjoy hanging out, we find ways to work together. We brainstorm about each others careers. We just both want to be helpful. Opportunities pop up naturally to collaborate and I’ve never wanted for work.
I don’t know how to teach that. It’s somewhat about my temperament. It’s a skill developed over decades.
Still I strongly recommend you practice it. Or at least just try to hang out and make friends with colleagues. The rest comes naturally.
Almost certainly the roles my wife is applying for are not actually open roles, they’re roles made with someone in mind. Or filled by someone better at the relational side than the technical skills.
They have power, but it’s not actually legal. Congress has mandated funds for this array, the administration wants to cripple it beyond repair before any legal action can catch up.