honestly I am not sure how actually are they spending that kind of money.
I dont see a ton of fb recruiters hiring for VR skills, I dont see a lot of training/certifications /open source libraries /platform Sdks for other devs etc that feels like $10B a year kind of budgets are behind VR/AR.
That's a lot of money, Hard space companies like SpaceX or Blue Origin which have big hardware expenses spend only 1-2 billon/year and have thousands or tens of thousands of staff working and their progress is visible .
Does FB have 20,000 + engineers working on metaverse? even if so, doing what exactly ?
you're looking in the wrong place. i have reality labs recruiters calling me frequently and my linked in feed is a never ending cascade of sponsored posts about how working ar FB^H^HMMVRS is so much fun.
I am sure FB is recruiting, my point is not that reality labs is fake , I am sure it is real and they do recruit, it just that I don't see recruitment that would signal that large a number of investment.
I wasn't saying from a personal engineer anecdotal experience, but as some one working in recruitment tech, I keep an eye on industry patterns.
I could be wrong in my impression but I think they are just doing bit of creative accounting on existing expenses to show high spends on their flagship project.
