https://ericlippert.com/2022/11/30/a-long-expected-update/ Skip to primary content Fabulous adventures in coding Eric Lippert's blog Fabulous adventures in coding Search [ ] [Search] Main menu * Home * About Eric Lippert * Photo credits * Privacy policy * Reprint policy Post navigation - Previous A long expected update Posted on November 30, 2022 by ericlippert It's been almost two years since my last update here. A lot has happened. I hope you all are continuing to weather the ongoing multiple global pandemics and other anthropogenic crises. Apologies that this is so long; I didn't have time to make it shorter. Obviously blogs do not come with a service level agreement, but some explanation is in order for the long gap. It's pretty simple. * Facebook actively discourages people to blog about their work. * Working from home during the covid pandemic was enervating. * After thinking about programming languages for many hours a week for over 25 years, I simply didn't have the energy and enthusiasm to write much on the subject. Blogging was an easy thing to drop in favor of pursuits that got me away from sitting in front of a screen in my home office. I've been spending my leisure time in the last couple years working on improving my nature photography skills and learning to scuba dive. Turns out you cannot catch covid when below 15 metres of seawater. And there are weird slugs in the Puget Sound! [315060562_] --------------------------------------------------------------------- [315430000_] ^Photos of the author and a golden dirona nudibranch by Amber, who convinced me to take up diving. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Today is the tenth anniversary of moving my blog to ericlippert.com on my last day at Microsoft, the fiftieth anniversary of my birth, and my last day at Facebook-now-Meta. My team -- Probabilistic Programming Languages -- and indeed entire "Probability" division were laid off a couple weeks ago; the last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned. The mission of the Probability division was to create small teams that applied the latest academic research to real-world at-scale problems, in order to improve other groups' decision-making and lower their costs. New sub-teams were constantly formed; if they didn't show results quickly then they were failed-fast; if they did show results then they were reorganized into whatever division they could most effectively lower costs. We were very successful at this. The PPL team in particular was at the point where we were regularly putting models into production that on net reduced costs by millions of dollars a year over the cost of the work. We were almost ready to be spun off. We foolishly thought that we would naturally be protected from any layoffs, being a team that reduced costs of any team we partnered with. In retrospect, that was a little naive. A team that reduces costs of other teams is not on anyone's critical path. The whole Probability division was laid off as a cost-cutting measure . I have no explanation for how this was justified and I note that if the company were actually serious about cost-cutting, they would have grown our team, not destroyed it. Speaking of cutting costs, the company is still pouring multiple billions of dollars into vaporware called "the metaverse". News flash: no one wants to wear VR goggles to spend any time in a digital heaven where the role of God is played by Mark Zuckerberg and you can do anything you can imagine, including "work" and "shop". Ugh. I would be happy to be shown to be wrong, wrong, wrong. Maybe there is a useful, engaging, fun, just, equitable, democratic, sustainable, novel VR experience where the avatars have legs, but Meta is $20 billion in and aside from the legs I don't see any evidence that any of the above is forthcoming. Yes, I am a little vexed. --------------------------------------------------------------------- I have a great many people to thank for my time at Facebook: Erik Meijer for recruiting me and finding seven years worth of interesting problems for me to dig into. Peter Hallam, with whom I have now worked with on three compiler teams at three companies, for encouraging me to take that offer. Walid Taha, Michael Tingley, John Myles White, Joe Pamer and Satish Chandra for their leadership and mentorship. And to many, many coworkers too numerous to mention here. The quality of the people I worked with at Facebook was amazing. Everyone was kind, smart, dedicated, thoughtful, generous with their time and knowledge, and a genuine pleasure to work with. I learned so much from all of them. Leaving those teammates is the hardest part. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Lots of people have asked how they can help me and my team. I am so grateful and appreciative. Friends, colleagues, strangers on Twitter, just about everyone has been sympathetic and helpful. Most of my team has found other positions and I am hopeful that the rest will soon. I am not looking for another position at this time. Why's that? I know I don't look it, but I'm beginning to feel it in my heart. I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread. I need a holiday. A very long holiday. And I don't expect I shall return. In fact I mean not to. I am very fortunate to have spent the pandemic thus far working safely from home, for a supportive team and for excellent pay. But after >26 years of thinking about programming languages for corporations, and the last three years of my work being thrown away, I need a good long corporate detox before I go looking again. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Coming up next on FAIC: The work we did on Bean Machine, our embedded Python DSL for Bayesian inference, is quite interesting. In coming episodes I'll explain what it is, how it works, and what we learned. No one else is ever going to do this post-mortem analysis, so I might as well! Share this: * Twitter * Facebook * Like this: Like Loading... Related This entry was posted in Uncategorized by ericlippert. Bookmark the permalink. 29 thoughts on "A long expected update" 1. [6b989af3]David on November 30, 2022 at 7:14 am said: Welcome back! I missed reading your blog. I hope you're doing okay in these crazy times Eric. Reply | + [836a]ericlippert on November 30, 2022 at 7:34 am said: Thanks! I am housed and fed and healthy; I'm doing fine. Reply | 2. [572fdc03]petercooperjr on November 30, 2022 at 7:15 am said: Thank you for the update, and the nifty photos! I'm not sure what specifically to say to be encouraging and sympathetic (just ask my wife about how bad I am at being encouraging), but I hope you continue to have (and share about) fabulous adventures, whether coding or otherwise. Reply | + [836a]ericlippert on November 30, 2022 at 7:35 am said: Thanks; I plan to! Reply | 3. [c9e347a2]AC on November 30, 2022 at 7:34 am said: Happy to see you blogging again. I love to read your posts. I am sorry to hear about the lay-off and the reason for it, but I hope you get to take off as much time as you need to move on to something else. Reply | + [836a]ericlippert on November 30, 2022 at 7:35 am said: Thanks; I'm glad to be back too. Looking forward to some time off. Reply | 4. [800d8ea1]zarenor on November 30, 2022 at 7:37 am said: It's disappointing to hear of so much work thrown away, but I'm glad to see you return to writing publicly! I hope you're doing well otherwise. I've always loved your writing around the net, and can't wait to read more. Reply | + [836a]ericlippert on November 30, 2022 at 7:51 am said: Thanks! I'm doing ok. Looking forward to having some time to write. Reply | 5. [d66d5925]jslicer on November 30, 2022 at 8:26 am said: Welcome back! Even though I used the feedly aggregator, I'd often visit ericlippert.com to see if the internet was broken. Sorry to hear about vexing corporate decisions, but on the other hand, WTF (Welcome to Fifty)! Reply | + [836a]ericlippert on November 30, 2022 at 8:55 am said: Thank you! Weird to be half a century old but I'll take it. Reply | 6. [750656dd]gr8bitmuncher on November 30, 2022 at 9:07 am said: It good to have you back Eric! Hopefully, you now have time to answer more questions on stackoverflow. Your help is badly needed since while questions are being answered (quick fix), most don't have the very details that are required for a full picture. Painting those details is an art - and thus it requires a skillful artist. Reply | + [836a]ericlippert on November 30, 2022 at 9:33 am said: Thanks! I still check in on SO occasionally but it is a different vibe than it was ten years ago. Much less fun, much less rewarding. The quality of the questions is pretty poor and there's a lot of negativity from the people I try to help. So I've scaled that back pretty dramatically. If any of that changes I'd consider putting more time into it. Reply | 7. [cdb46b47]Rajesh on November 30, 2022 at 10:06 am said: Big fan of your's writing.Welcome back.Love to read insightful writings Reply | + [836a]ericlippert on November 30, 2022 at 10:19 am said: Thanks! Reply | 8. [1e830f7d]Thierry le bohec on November 30, 2022 at 10:44 am said: Thank you for giving news : I hoped you havent been ill with Covid. Sorry for your abandoned work, I hope that your researches could come to life in any kind ! (Sorry for my poor English, I'm French and really loved reading your blogs and stackov' posts) Reply | + [836a]ericlippert on November 30, 2022 at 11:31 am said: Your English is fine! Much better than my terrible high school Quebecois French. Fortunately I have managed to avoid covid so far, by being up to date on vaccines, avoiding crowds and enclosed spaces with strangers, masking when I cannot avoid that, testing regularly before socializing, and massively reducing the amount of travel and dining out that I'd normally do in a year. I'm not very happy about spending another few years doing that but it looks like I'm going to have to. Thanks for your kind words! Reply | 9. [7178b464]Robert Hahn on November 30, 2022 at 10:59 am said: Hey welcome back to the blog! Sorry to hear about the layoffs. For all the downsides and disappointments, it seems like it's come at the right time - as you say, you can now take the time to rest and what a gift that is! All the best! Reply | + [836a]ericlippert on November 30, 2022 at 11:31 am said: Thanks Rob! Good to hear from you. Would love to catch up with you and the family sometime. Reply | 10. [050efc05]Nat Knight on November 30, 2022 at 11:28 am said: I'm so, so sorry. I had two years of work killed by academic infighting and I wouldn't wish that soul-crushing disappointment on anyone. Reply | + [836a]ericlippert on November 30, 2022 at 11:32 am said: Thanks -- it is indeed disappointing and is rather putting a damper on any celebrations today. Reply | 11. [b38376e8]codegardener on November 30, 2022 at 11:33 am said: > I am not looking for another position at this time.... and the last three years of my work being thrown away, I need a good long corporate detox before I go looking again. I really feel this. I'm about to finish up a contract working on a product that's about to be killed before ever really seeing the light of day, and just when we were starting to get some good results. It's kind of hard not to feel like Sisyphus at this point. I'm not really interested in looking for something else for a while, either. Reply | + [836a]ericlippert on November 30, 2022 at 11:50 am said: Sorry to hear that! Lots of it going around apparently. Reply | 12. [c30d3b3b]Mark Simpson on November 30, 2022 at 12:05 pm said: Sorry to hear you & your team have been through the wringer on this one, Eric. I've worked on projects that have been shelved and have also been laid off, and it can be deeply frustrating -- especially when the work has tangible value. Looking forward to seeing more blog entries, as your articles are always interesting. I was (gladly) corrected/educated by you on Stackoverflow a few times over the years, too! Always appreciated. Reply | + [836a]ericlippert on November 30, 2022 at 2:39 pm said: It is frustrating! I am looking forward to blogging more though. Thanks for the kind words. Reply | 13. [4ca36f30]Martin on November 30, 2022 at 1:48 pm said: I wasn't able to join the probabilistic team after Bootcamp, and one of my biggest regrets was not trying to join it again before leaving Facebook/Meta. Just curious: where would you start looking for interesting work? I'm finding it hard to find a job that genuinely interests me. Reply | + [836a]ericlippert on November 30, 2022 at 2:40 pm said: Well you'd be just looking for work now if you did -- but it was fun while it lasted. See the twitter thread I linked in the post; there are a lot of interesting opportunities there. Reply | 14. [c2f1aa3b]Chris Alcock on November 30, 2022 at 1:56 pm said: Enjoy your very well deserved corporate detox Eric - nice to see you blogging again, Meta's loss will be all our gain! Best wishes from across the pond. Reply | + [836a]ericlippert on November 30, 2022 at 2:41 pm said: Thank you Chris, that's kind of you to say. And I think I have never thanked you for your so-frequent support of my blog over the years. I really appreciate all the links. Thank you! Reply | 15. [9ee64192]Pat Lasswell on November 30, 2022 at 2:52 pm said: Sigh. Knowing that you were there working to make better languages for us all was the one redeeming thought that I had about FB. So much for that. 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