[HN Gopher] DevRel at HuggingFace
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DevRel at HuggingFace
Author : swyx
Score : 126 points
Date : 2024-07-16 18:56 UTC (4 hours ago)
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| dinobones wrote:
| In every company I've worked for, the biggest fans/lovers of
| meetings/let's "touch base" have always been: The most useless
| members of our team.
|
| And I _truly_ mean that, whether PM /TPM/or even SDM/SDE. The
| common denominator is they were always absolutely useless, adding
| no value or no true technical contribution, and their only value
| add was siloing information and claiming to be in "meetings" to
| lead some effort forward.
|
| Their entire job function could've probably been replaced by a
| wiki or Google Doc. They intentionally made themselves the only
| points of contact and did not introduce people cross team because
| people would probably immediately realize how useless they are.
|
| I've seen this multiple times, multiple roles, L5+, earning 100s
| of thousands of dollars a year at big tech companies.
|
| Yes, I will waste 45 minutes of my time explaining word for word
| to you, exactly what is written in this design document, and none
| of it will be documented, no AIs will come from it, so you can
| look "busy" for today and tell your manager you did something.
| Woohoo collaboration!
| iwontberude wrote:
| I, for one, represent this comment.
| frutiger wrote:
| Hard to say what situations you have experienced because the
| details are scant, but in my experience usually those people
| have helped, in one way or another, to ensure that my pay check
| has the specific number that it does.
|
| Simply put: they use the information they gain to justify the
| utility of individual team members to the overall effort and
| thus the proportionate compensation.
| dinobones wrote:
| No my friend, the people who ensure the paycheck has the
| specific number it does are some drones in HR far removed
| from you. They determine reasonable bands for your role based
| on industry standards and how the company wants to position
| itself in the market.
|
| Then your individual contribution and performance determines
| an additional +-10%.
| frutiger wrote:
| Don't know which company you work for but this is
| unequivocally not true at mine. HR are subservient to
| Engineering (our CEO started as a senior SWE ~15 years
| ago). I am also one of those "useless" EMs that barter for
| the comp packages of my most valuable SWEs.
| Geezus_42 wrote:
| Your situation seems rare.
| xcrjm wrote:
| From my experience there's a lot more wiggle room in those
| pay bands than you'd think. Along with that, at many orgs
| your EM has to haggle on your behalf with their boss and
| every other EM that shares their budget ~yearly for your
| share of a limited pool of incremental dollars. I've
| specifically requested not to be under certain EMs in the
| past for that reason.
| jvans wrote:
| > Yes, I will waste 45 minutes of my time explaining word for
| word to you, exactly what is written in this design document
|
| And they will misunderstand you, turn around and butcher the
| explanation to some higher up, indirectly claiming credit for
| your work as the messenger of its result. If something goes
| wrong with the project, they'll definitely make sure to
| emphasize your involvement in the failed initiative,
| strategically distancing themselves.
| the_panopticon wrote:
| This reminds me of the saying
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/success_has_many_fathers,_fai...
| that I've seen often played out in big companies, too.
| crowcroft wrote:
| I don't think meetings or OKRs are inherently bad, I have
| worked in organisations where these kinds of things are
| actually done well. Equally no OKRs and no meetings can be fine
| as well.
|
| Where the problem exists is when the systems and processes
| business use start to become calcified into the organisation's
| way of working, and compliance is used to control the work
| people do.
|
| RACI, RASCI, DACI as an example are all fine mental models for
| thinking about how people or teams should work on a project.
| But if I'm planning a project and propose a DACI, and then my
| project ends up getting derailed because some other manager
| thinks we should use a RACI instead it's probably game over.
| j45 wrote:
| The kind of momentum maintaining alignment can provide is
| unreal. I hope this topic and HuggingFace and other doing it
| keeps getting more attention and details being shared. Nothings
| perfect, but it sure seems like it would work well for some
| people :)
|
| Having a team of thoughtful and professional self-directed
| learners and creators sounds amazing if you can get a space for
| a team to come together around it.
|
| Companies that have to, or choose to compromise on their labour
| force, either from a competency or salary perspective often
| have to put more supports in place to keep people longer.
|
| Doesn't mean OKRs, etc are the correct solution.
| onion2k wrote:
| _Their entire job function could 've probably been replaced by
| a wiki or Google Doc._
|
| I'm an Engineering Manager these days and I suspect this is
| true to an extent for my role. All I seem to do is relay
| information from one group to another, translate from one
| jargon to a different jargon, figure out who to talk to in
| order to get someone to be able to push a button, and, more
| often than I'd like, sit in meetings and remember things when
| someone else has forgotten. If my teams and the teams they work
| with wrote things down in discoverable and organized ways I
| would be out of a job.
|
| However, due to the fact my teams are made up of fallible,
| disorganized, and very human people, my job seems pretty safe,
| and I get a great deal of satisfaction from knowing I help a
| lot of people get a lot more done than if I wasn't around.
| spamizbad wrote:
| I'll give you a big reason why this behavior exists: people
| refuse to write high quality documentation regarding their
| systems/processes/etc. Or they are willing do it, but do an
| extremely poor job and are oblivious to its low quality. This
| will necessitate meetings to "Clear things up". And sometimes
| your documentation ticks all the boxes, but people get pissy
| about updating it because it's not in their preferred format
| and it rots away into irrelevance.
|
| When I became an engineering manager I invested a ton of effort
| into providing solid documentation where people expect it:
| Swagger docs with real examples for our RESTful services for
| devs, confluence documentation for wider audiences, various
| guides and FAQs, and even in-repo ADRs. It probably saves us
| about 15 labor hours of meetings a week and maximizes my team's
| hands-on-keyboard time and minimizes interruptions.
| iftheshoefitss wrote:
| It's kind of crazy you're describing the person that made me
| leave tech to the last detail
|
| The weird part to me is I've worked with PhD folk, DARPA
| hackers, FAANG folk and they were so kind to me even when I
| said dumb things the person on the other hand was just idk how
| to describe it made coding just painful idk why though to this
| day
| lolpanda wrote:
| I'm curious here how do they make money? i heard that they have
| ai consulting service. is that sufficient to run the company? i
| don't think any researchers i know pay for hugging face.
| jsheard wrote:
| Most AI startups are following the Underpants Gnomes business
| plan:
|
| Phase 1 - Launch product which loses money
|
| Phase 2 - ???
|
| Phase 3 - Profit!
|
| Few have progressed past the first phase yet.
| handzhiev wrote:
| Hugging Face is already profitable according to Clement
| https://x.com/ClementDelangue/status/1811675386368966682
| ArnoVW wrote:
| That is a well known lesson. In any goldrush it is always
| profitable to sell pickaxes and spades to the miners. The
| miners themselves generally do less well (except the happy
| few that strike gold)
| binarymax wrote:
| I'm not entirely sure but I suspect through their ML
| hosting/inference/training products and services they have
| working with enterprises. But I'm still baffled how they cover
| their AWS storage and egress fees :)
|
| I remember seeing a post last week-ish from Julien Chaumond
| that they are profitable.
| lbhdc wrote:
| I was curious as well what the business model is.
|
| They are selling related services. Looks like data and
| inference offerings with per seat pricing.
| https://huggingface.co/pricing
| max_ wrote:
| I had a similar idea for something like hugging face in 2016.
| (I feel so stupid I didn't execute)
|
| My business model was that people with great models trained on
| proprietary data sets would buy & sell trained weights and fine
| tuned models for private use.
|
| Here is an example.
|
| No e-commerce business is going to easily publish their sales
| data for everyone to train so they can build a great model for
| optimizing recommendations of products.
|
| Hiring an internal AI team may have 2 problems.
|
| - It may cost too much - May not work as well - You may not
| have the appropriate data set or data size (DL is very data
| intensive).
|
| For a small fraction of what it may cost to hire your own team.
| You may buy a fine tuned models or readily trained weights that
| you just "plug & play".
|
| That sounds like reasonable model.
|
| The client (e-commerce) saves money, time, is guaranteed
| success, and gets the bonus productivity output from AI
| integration.
|
| What do you guys think? Tarpit idea?
|
| If I owned hugging face, I would follow such a strategy.
| altdataseller wrote:
| They sell subscriptions to their products for teams and
| collaboration (dont ask me why its needed tho)
| ZiiS wrote:
| Step 1: Be at exactly the optimum point during a massive
| opportunity.
|
| Step 2: Do almost anything you will still grow.
| crowcroft wrote:
| Market forces trump individual performance.
|
| Not to say this way of working isn't good, but HuggingFace's
| success is not a great data point to validate the hypothesis.
| swyx wrote:
| it does demonstrate lack of fatal flaws i guess? and startups
| are all about lasting long enough til PMF is found
| 0x000xca0xfe wrote:
| There is nothing you cannot ruin with dumb enough management.
| LegitShady wrote:
| that comes later
| nextworddev wrote:
| this is the most accurate answer unless you are AWS, Azure, or
| GCP. source: ex-AWS GTM
| blitzar wrote:
| Step 1: Buy lottery ticket with correct numbers on it.
|
| Step 2: Cash it in and make a lot of money.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| This suggests the iterated optimum strategy is to just keep
| chasing new points trying to land that golden moment, though.
| If you think such points and moments are plentiful enough that
| you'll find them in your lifetime reliably (I do!).
| Drew_ wrote:
| > This suggests the iterated optimum strategy is to just keep
| chasing new points trying to land that golden moment, though.
|
| Yup exactly. We call that venture capital
| throwadobe wrote:
| I mean, it's also the fact that they were the first to create a
| hub for the most massive secular technology trend since the
| advent of the internet. It's almost like anything short of utter
| incompetence would have worked here. So as interesting as it is
| to hear how they did it, it's not necessarily actionable advice
| or the most efficient, effective, productive approach
| michaelmior wrote:
| This seems like survivorship bias. Kaggle was pretty well-
| positioned to do what Hugging Face is doing (and in fact, they
| are trying now somewhat). There's also a lot of others that
| tried to build a marketplace for AI models and failed.
| throwadobe wrote:
| Kaggle is trying too many things at the same time. It's
| confusing. If you confuse, you lose.
| altdataseller wrote:
| Kaggle always was a place to conpete in data science
| contests to me. I never associated it with anything else.
| If they did sell ML models they did a horrible job letting
| people know about it
| whiplash451 wrote:
| I think you're underplaying HF by a significant margin. There
| were many opportunities to blunder along the way (and there
| still are btw).
| abidlabs wrote:
| Lucky to be part of this company and seen this strategy work
| close up. One thing I'll add is this "decentralized" approach
| applies to all Hugging Face teams, not just the developer
| advocacy team. Just to give an example, there's no central comms
| team at Hugging Face, every team (usually the engineers who work
| on the product or features) does their own comms across the
| channels they think work best. That means there's lots of
| experimentation and most of our hires tend to be generalists who
| are comfortable wearing many hats.
| mvkel wrote:
| Why is it that whenever a company happens to be successful, and
| does meetings/goals differently than most (also successful)
| companies, the success is attributed to the lack of
| meetings/goals, and not, y'know, the business?
| api wrote:
| Being the GitHub of AI models is like _the thing to be_ for the
| last two years when it comes to scaling. I 'm surprised it was
| only 300% not like 2000%.
|
| Not trash talking them, just agreeing that there are other
| factors.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I read your comment as:
|
| > Why is it X and not, y'know, X?
|
| Is there something central to what a business is _besides_ the
| way communication happens within it?
| snapcaster wrote:
| I think there are a few reasons for this. The primary one is
| that it's a visible signal, and people make attribution errors
| almost constantly so it gets fixated on. I think the other
| reason might be that it's unpopular (and not actionable) to say
| "this company succeeded because the people there are better
| than you" or "this company had great product market fit, and
| the employees efforts really didn't make the difference"
| osanseviero wrote:
| Hi all! I'm Omar from Hugging Face. Happy to answer any questions
| you might have about Hugging Face in general, llamas, and open
| ML!
| ZoomerCretin wrote:
| Could you talk more about HuggingFace's new benchmark for LLMs?
| When did it become obvious that the old benchmarks were no
| longer sufficient:
| swyx wrote:
| [author here] we interviewed the maintainer of that
| leaderboard if you want to hear from her directly!
| https://www.latent.space/p/benchmarks-201
|
| tldr: old benchmarks saturated, methodology was liable to a
| lot of subtle biases. as she mentions on the pod, they're
| already working on leaderboard v3.
| Hooray_Darakian wrote:
| How large is the staff at hugging face?
| abidlabs wrote:
| We have ~220 total team members across all roles
| brianjking wrote:
| I'd love to work at Hugging Face! Happen to be hiring any new
| dev relations/product/AI engineer type roles?
|
| This is such a great piece.
| ibejoeb wrote:
| What is an OKR?
|
| update: dead serious. I searched. It says "objectives and key
| results." But what does one look like? Is it a document?
| sa-code wrote:
| Bless your heart
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| A buzzword that no one actually takes seriously and means very
| little in practice but that managers use to justify their jobs.
| 0x000xca0xfe wrote:
| The biggest impact I've seen is that you cannot adjust
| priorities for an entire quarter.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| astrology charting for MBA's solely because Google did it at
| one point
| scubbo wrote:
| Sorry you received unhelpful sass from other commenters. It
| stands for "Objective and Key Result" - it's a common
| "business-speak" initialism that basically translates to "a
| measurable, data-driven goal".
| romanhn wrote:
| I'd say it's more than that. OKRs are a concrete framework
| that came out of Intel and was popularized by Google. But
| yes, the focus is on setting objectives backed by measurable
| results.
|
| Can be a document, an app, whatever. One flavor is objectives
| are set at the top, their KRs are translated into objectives
| for the next management layer with their own KRs, and so on.
| It's an iterative process with some combination of top-down
| and bottoms-up activities. And afterwards, the results are
| reviewed. There's more to it, but that's the gist.
| simonw wrote:
| An objective is a qualitative goal. The key results are
| generally quantitative numbers that can help you measure if you
| are achieving that goal.
|
| An example: an objective might be "improve application
| performance". The key results for that objective might be
| "reduce average page load time from 3s to 1.5s" and "reduce API
| response times by 60%".
| ibejoeb wrote:
| Got it. I guess that was just illustrative, though, because
| why isn't "reduce average page load time from 3s to 1.5s" the
| objective?
|
| Ah, I see. It bubbles. Explained by
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40979799
|
| Thanks everyone.
| romanhn wrote:
| If you were to tell your CEO you're reducing page load
| time, they will rightfully ask you why and what problem
| you're solving. The objective is the simple sentence that
| makes the "why" clear. It might itself be subordinate to a
| higher level objective. The idea is that all work is
| clearly aligned to specific goals in a very transparent
| manner.
|
| It's actually a very solid framework, but as the many
| comments indicate, poor implementations abound (also see
| Agile, DevOps, etc).
| williamstein wrote:
| https://youtu.be/XAeKtyL2m-Q [Interview with Jr. Product
| Manager]
| ffsm8 wrote:
| Let's say your day job is providing a website on which paying
| customers can upload images.
|
| Youre currently only supporting jpeg and png.
|
| Your objective for a quarter could be to broaden support.
|
| So you'd plan to add 10 additional formats. If you add 8,
| you've achieved your goal. Makes sense, right?
|
| Honestly, the snide comments are spot on. It was even dumber
| then SMART SCRUM, aka development via waterfall, which is
| totally agile xoxo
| ibejoeb wrote:
| I swear this is entirely earnest. That example works. Except:
|
| >So you'd plan to add 10 additional formats. If you add 8,
| you've achieved your goal.
|
| My plan was to add 10, and I added 8. I achieved my goal?
| deathanatos wrote:
| In the original envisioning, yes; typically, 100% was set
| at a stretch goal, with ~70% being the more actual target.
| >= 70% was thus successful.
|
| But, most of the places I've seen doing "OKRs" are just
| appropriating the word but not the actual system.
| Geezus_42 wrote:
| The point is that you set a goal and made progress towards
| it. Ideally you choose goals for yourself and it's expected
| that you won't complete them all.
|
| I still don't like it.
| xcrjm wrote:
| My experience of them was that upper management set
| "Objectives" like "1% YoY Online Sales Growth" for your group
| or team or whatever and then each team in that group (again, or
| whatever) would come up with their own "Key Results" that they
| thought, if the result was achieved, would translate to that
| objective.
|
| So for example, if you worked in online retail like I did,
| maybe you'd get an objective like that and then hypothesize a
| few things along the lines of "if we increase product image
| interactions by X% then sales should go up by Y%." as key
| results that you then report back out to management to show
| progress towards your objective.
| parhamn wrote:
| Interesting. Independent of the specific strategies, I always
| think of HuggingFace as squandering potential. They
| could/should/can be the singular place where you explore _and_
| productionize these open/social models. But their offerings are
| nowhere near as good as Replicate and the others. At least last I
| checked.
| Animats wrote:
| DevRel is just a transient phase during ramp-up. Once you get
| market dominance, you squeeze the independent developers by
| controlling their platform access and pricing, and keep all the
| high-revenue products for yourself. See Apple, Microsoft, Google,
| etc.
| walterbell wrote:
| Dev(sher)Lock
| tiffanyh wrote:
| > "growing from 780k to 2.3m repos on the HF Hub in the past
| year"
|
| Is this what caused the title to be "300%"?
|
| a. that's actually ~200%
|
| b. isn't growth, as defined by number of repos (which might be
| free) the wrong metric. It's super is to scale adoption when
| you're giving something away for free
| mucle6 wrote:
| I was going to correct you but I was wrong
|
| For anyone else that got tripped up... 1x to 3x is 200% growth
| because you don't get to count the original 1x
| umvi wrote:
| It's kind of confusing because it depends on how you phrase
| it with percentages.
|
| "The number of cores in the PC went up by 50%" means "there
| are now 1.5x as many cores"
|
| However, "the number of cores in the PC is 50% what is was
| last year" means "there are now .5x as many cores"
|
| In this case 200% is fairly unambiguous, but imagine a phrase
| like "scaling community 50% per year" which could mean
| different things depending on the direction of the scaling...
| I think it's more intuitive to use a multiplier: "scaling
| community 3x bigger per year" makes it easy to visualize an
| online community tripling in size every year.
| swyx wrote:
| [OP here] yeah youre right i've adjusted to 200%, ty
| dheera wrote:
| They said 300%, not growth by 300%
|
| IMO I prefer the former ("growth factor") calculation to the
| "growth by" calculation as it's simpler, it's just
| [the_percentage]/100 * current_value
|
| in the other case it is (the_percentage + 100)/100 *
| current_value which takes an extra CPU cycle of my brain
| swyx wrote:
| [op here] i've just switched it to 200% bc its the smaller
| number, but i agree that was what i was thinking
| abidlabs wrote:
| (b) growth is still the right metric imo. for example, lots of
| open-source libraries (which by definition are available to use
| for free) measure and optimize for growth
| unixhero wrote:
| Nowhere in the article it is stated what devrel stands for. What
| is it?
| wonger_ wrote:
| Developer relations
| JSDevOps wrote:
| And what is that exactly? Is it just Jen from the IT crowd?
| enlightens wrote:
| No, it's marketing, education, "evangelism", and other
| outreach focused directly towards developers.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developer_relations
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_evangelist
| edude03 wrote:
| It feels hard to ask this without sounding snarky, but how do you
| separate growth from making good decision and having a good
| product from growth (in this case) because AI is hot and HF
| offers a lot of utility for free?
| 0x1ch wrote:
| I know a pretty affluent tech grifter who attended this. I'll
| pass on this nonsense.
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