You undoubtedly had other options, yet you chose to work for one of the most well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organizations on the planet. Former employees will deflect and make the comparison to United Fruit workers, despite the obvious difference in employee-optionality and influence.
You made your bed. I hope your organization gets destroyed. I hope you reflect on the damage you've caused the world.
It's getting to the point where selling my soul to the highest bidder is going to be absolutely required for any big tech job going forward.
Can you expand on this? Aren't there plenty of "not-amazing-but-definitely-not-evil" organizations out there which need talented engineers?
I won't color any large entity uniformly bad at all times and aspects.
People created PyTorch and React, they happen to be working at Meta at the time.
Maybe it's unlikely they'd create those working elsewhere, but I think it's much more unlikely that someone else at Meta would have created the same thing without those people there.
Oh yes, I would color Meta.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_emotional_manipulatio...
"Company over country!" -- Mark Zuckerberg https://www.yahoo.com/news/book-zuckerberg-called-company-ov...
I am ashamed I worked there.
Like, you can go be a middle school teacher and probably be fine if you stuffed the sack while the stuffing was good.
Nowadays, when I look at job listings, practically all of them are for companies that are ethically compromised in some way. They are overusing generative AI or building products that are having a negative impact on society.
One of the worst examples I saw was a software engineer job posting from my previous employeer that builds cloud-based physical security systems for buildings.The job requires the use of AI. I wouldn't trust a security system that randomly decides to unlock the front door to my house because of a hallucination.
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.
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.
Facebook seems to be the most misinformed audience - an LLM fact checker would be a great addition.
Agreed, what a damage to the world.
When you step back and try to explain exactly what the company has done that's so bad, there's nothing there.
The chairman of the U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar stated that Facebook played a "determining role" in the Rohingya genocide.[98] Facebook has been accused of enabling the spread of Islamophobic content which targets the Rohingya people.[99] The United Nations Human Rights Council has called the platform "a useful instrument for those seeking to spread hate".[100]
True, none of us are innocent.
> When you step back and try to explain exactly what the company has done that's so bad, there's nothing there.
WTF?
I know a number of people that accepted roles with companies they vowed never to work for after being laid off and unemployed for a year. The reality is that when you look at tech in abroad context, there really are very few ethical and/or noble companies.
The reality is that more engineers need to be able to grow a spine, have longer term thinking and actually stand their ground when it comes to these companies. You could not pay me enough money to work at Meta or Palantir and while it's true there are very few ethical or noble companies, working for Meta is more akin to completely throwing out your ethical compass.
And you would be stupid not to.
One one hand, you can be that guy that says you declined a Meta job, and be stuck at your current salary level, watching people make more money around you, and realize that even people who are make less than you truly absolutely just DGAF that you declined a Meta job - sure, they will tell you its a good thing, but its not like you get rewarded for it with having more friends or social support, in the end you are just still another person to them.
On another hand, you can make enough money to secure a good life for yourself, create new accounts on social media websites if you want to talk about Meta in a more positive light, and find new friend groups that are easily accessible with having more salaries (just buy a BMW a show up to any BMW meetup and bam, new friends right out of the gate).
The 2024 election should be a clear indicator that people just simply DGAF about each other as much as people think.
And BMW meetups are not good ways to meet high-salary people. Likely the exact opposite.
Not OP but I can say with 100% truth and certainty that it wouldn’t matter how much money they offered - I would not work for meta. Some things matter more than money.
I feel gross about the place I’m at and I don’t want to lose that feeling.
edit: sorry but if you purposely to chose to work at Meta after 2016 you clearly have zero morals and are fine with working at a company that not only willingly exacerbated a genocide but knowingly profited off of it too.
These workers can't be condemned enough, some of these devs should be in prison too.
FYI there's nothing that said the depression Facebook intentionally causes in teenagers is limited to just girls.
You really think if they didn't work there, someone else wouldn't?
You really think them and only them are the people capable of doing whatever technical things are causing the problems you perceive?
One day, when there is no job for you, you will look back on this moment and chide your past self.
There is no organisation that has their hands clean. Not even the one you work for.
And while it's true that many organizations carry dirty laundry, especially as they scale into larger organizations with fingers in more pies, Meta's business model is specifically to maximize engagement by any means available so that it can sell their eyeballs to the most lucrative advertising opportunities.
In Facebook's early days and as Whatsapp continues to do, their products may incidentally provided a useful societal function for earnestly connecting people in the way that those people wanted to be connected. But there's no way to look at it through the lens of a socially responsible business -- a qualitative difference from an organization simply not having "clean hands".
people say this as if having principles will leave you jobless inevitably, but there is so much evidence to the contrary that this rings more hollow the older I get.
I agree with your overall concept of empathy towards others, I disagree with the premise that all organizations are unethical and that there isn't room for the morally principal'd and employed in this world.
contrarily I believe that a morally principal'd and skilled engineer is so rare in this world that there are a few organizations that would snap up every single one they could find if the network was there to find them.
There are plenty of organizations that don't enable genocide.
That nearly none will do this (I suspect most would be irritated at even the suggestion) tells you all you need to know about them.
edit: The disagreement is unsurprising, but I'd like to hear the reasoning against this. If you truly believed you'd wronged humanity at a job you voluntarily took for its high pay over all the others you could have easily gotten, keeping the exorbitant excesses of money should be unpalatable to you. That's how having a conscience works. Anything else is just a vacuous attempt to regain social standing.
This really doesn't sound believable to me, but who knows with all the craziness going on. Software developers in the US are seriously expensive, using them for data labeling would be a waste of resources. And the percentage sounds very high, unless "core teams" is only a small subset of the total developer count.
The frontier work is on labeling and training expert content, by experts. It's unglamorous work and almost certainly doesn't warrant FAANG pay, but neither did most of the work that most FAANG engineers were already doing. But it does require competent talent from the expert domain.
Like their peer companies, Meta is still sitting on a huge pool of vetted-as-competant workers from the hiring boom and expert AI training is the most ripe business opportunity in a fragile economy where pretty much every comparable opportunity has evaporated.
Zuck basically went to a town hall and explained to his employees that their remaining value to him is as training mules for his AI.
Gavin from Silicon Valley did it first
Soooo, yes it is a waste of resources ($$$). But this was the initial intention.
I haven't interviewed with them in almost 10 years. But aren't they doing the same interview everyone else does?
Ironically this vanishes when the tables are turned and we ask for things like better hardware or software. There are plenty of us here with stories of how much effort it took to convince employers that SSDs were worth it when they were new, small, and very expensive.
A lot of people are going to leave as soon as they hit their next vest.
Would it? It seems like they can spend a few months extracting intelligence and "taste" from their engineers then get years worth of it back from the AI.
Although it goes without saying that good software engineers won't enjoy doing this very much
So if you have access to a large number of highly skilled people, and you really don't absolutely need them to do other things, why wouldn't you force data labeling tasks on them?
Facebook is also planning a 10% layoff, so this also works as encouragement for people to leave voluntarily.
(Before you downvote me, note that I'm not endorsing this or saying it's a good idea. I'm just saying that I believe it's true, because I can see how Facebook's leadership would think it's a good idea.)
> Forced data labeling with 4,500+ engineers is to generate high-quality RLHF
I doubt that you get high quality from forced reassignments where the now-data labelers don’t actually want to do that kind of work.
It’s crazy to think that Meta leadership believed that it makes sense.
As others have commented, some of the training is very specialized.
Is work such as changing the styling of a button on the Instagram app any more useful than that?
Mining work was unglamorous and dangerous but was needed. Labeling work is the mining of the AI era.
They won't be doing it for long.
I 100% can see this being the case not only with Zuck, but with many other companies. I am flabbergasted that I am a lowly peon in the machine, and yet unless I'm missing something, I seem to be a lot smarter than most of the people I see running these companies. I honestly feel like someone in the future is going to write a Greek tragedy about this time, because it's going to get real bad very soon
The difference here is that this particular wave of propaganda hits people whose actions have deep effects on their industries, so their unreasonable actions are far more visible.
We already know what the algorithm does to normal people - it should be treated like a radioactive object by anyone in charge of anything. Very powerful and strictly used judiciously and in small doses. Instead we've got some of the most powerful people on earth just cooking their brains on this shit just like anyone else watching reels on the bus.
This stuff is putting an expiration date on your domain experience, and leadership is salivating at the chance to cut OpEx.
At bare minimum, every PM is soon going to be able to do your work. That's a huge talent pool to draw from. This also opens the door to easy offshoring.
They'll use layoffs to get rid of the existing high salary earners and backfill with new hires earning 70%, then 50%, then...
I can't believe how many of you are absolutely certain you're going to be working in software in ten years. Let alone five.
Statistics really is a bitch.
That's possible, but don't underestimate the cleansing power of a huge market crash. I don't know how it'll shake out, nobody does, but I'd bet in a few years hardly anyone will be looking back on the gung-ho AI thoughtleadering of 2026 as anything other than a stain on history.
Something that can be useful but being over-reliant on especially at a management level, could be disastrous.
I've been fortunate enough to have worked on multiple AI intensive engineering teams (both on the product and research side) where considerable effort was spent reasoning through how AI was changing things and we were consistently evolving our practices. But they've all been orgs with 50 people less.
AI psychosis seems to effect very large tech orgs in a different way than small, high impact teams.
In small startups, at the end of the day, if the team doesn't ship a quality product, the company fails. Most importantly, every individual still bares the responsibility of their work. Personally, I've seen a lot of thoughtfulness around things like bad PRs because, on good teams, people realize we're all struggling to figure this out. But nonetheless, if something doesn't go well, there's always an individual that needs to figure out how to make it better. Virtually all the things I've learned about functionally shipping products built with and using AI have come from teams like this. Software engineering is changing, but for those of us shipping products, it reminds me a lot of the early webdev days when we were all trying to figure out the patterns to make this new world of software work reliably (anyone who recalls the pre-jQuery JavaScript days will remember how much we had to figure out before webdev could become what is today).
In large tech orgs there's a much, much larger disconnect between employee effort and concrete value delivered and similarly much larger diffusion of responsibility. When accountability is abstract and nobody is quite sure what the real value of their work is, then there is fertile ground for AI psychosis to run amok. In part this is because there is a certain latent psychosis in these larger orgs anyway; who's "productive" and what's "valuable" always requires a bit of imaginative story telling, not necessarily grounded in reality.
However, I don't think this will persist long as the "new normal". Just like in the rise of web application development, smaller teams will charge ahead and figure some of this stuff out. The MVC pattern applied to webapps, increasingly powerful JavaScript frameworks and best practices, agile practices, git and the popularization of github, the use of No SQL for scaling etc all primarily where battled tested by smaller, high velocity startups and now lay a foundation I'm sure some contemporary devs don't even realize needed to be built by anyone.
It was the engineers at the ground floor who I watched become religious about it. They have been the ones pushing for deeper and deeper tooling. They have been the ones convincing leadership that this is the future and so now, well, it's leadership who is saying, we want more adoption.
This psychosis is happening at every level in our industry, and this isn't a big tech, or leadership problem. It's all our problems.
The look-at-this-crazy-revenue-faucet period resulted in a LOT of constant hiring for a solid decade. That's not the way towards an efficient org.
So even if they fuck over 70% of their expeienced staff and are left with a relative skeleton crew, they'll likely be able to keep the lights on and keep the advertising-revenue-faucet running for years.
And... given that they've mostly failed to break much of any new ground despite all the previous hiring, the rest of the world probably won't care.
(Plus, as the article itself notes, Meta has long had a pretty toxic perf-review culture; speculation about if that has to do with the lack of any particularly noteworthy new products/features/etc is left to the reader ;) )
the new normal for our industry
I believe that the cultures that were developed outside of Meta are used to launder the image that meta as a whole has a good engineering culture.
They had always sung the praises of Instagram's culture but said they didn't recognize the company that they came back to. Literally night and day between the best and worst place they'd worked.
WhatsApp was a textbook example of how not to do an acquisition. The story I heard was when it was acquired, a spreadsheet went around and everyone basically decided what level they were in the (then) FB job ladder and all the engineers said they were E7s (Senior Staff SWE). The way PSC worked, WhatsApp at the time was only ever calibrated against themselves (from what I heard). It had become a fiefdom and, as someone who was on a team that tried to get them to do anything, the experience was awful.
IG was handled better but it was also an almost nonexistent team when acquired, which might well explain it. They stuck with their Django/Python codebase and (IMHO) that was a mistake. The amount of duplication that we had to do for IG specifically was embarrasing. The framework and tooling FB had on the product side was light years ahead of what IG had. IG used to have a very good product focus but I think that's long dead now. It was good because IG had a clear vision for their app and ultimately (IMHO) management had a different view to "grow". They briefly tried to launch another app (IGTV) that flopped, hard. There were a bunch of UI/UX changes that clearly showed the focus had become simply following celebrities instead of sharing updates (eg where the post/compose buttons moved to).
I mention Google because I saw the same things happen at Google.
Youtube was (and my guess is, still is) its own entity. Culturally, Youtubers don't see themselves as Googlers. They didn't (AFAIK) use Google3 or any of the other stuff most of the rest of Google did. But Youtube itself was perceived very positively, technically, particularly in relation just general encoding/decoding infrastructure as well as Bandaid (where racks are shipped to ISPs to cache videos).
Android was another acquisition that prided itself in not being Google. This was very much fostered by Andy Rubin while he was still there. Obviously Google needed to write Android apps but I got the sense that it was always Google engineers who solved all the problems whereas Android just didn't care. They cared only about shipping Android. Fuchsia was an Android offshoot.
Docs and Maps were both acquisitions but they went fully Google3 and were different orgs but weren't seen as separate. The engineering director of Docs (Fuzzy) had, from what I can recall, a very positive reputation beyond Docs (now Drive).
Doubleclick was also an acqusition but went fully Google and you'll find a lot of people who don't even know it was an acquisition.
I don't know what org you worked in but they all vary. My own experience was that Infra orgs in comparison to Google were primitive and barely above just running random Docker-like (Tupperware) instances with a godawful variant of C++, probably started by someone who had done C++ at Google and had decided they really wanted mutable function parameters and exceptions for no particular reason.
The thing I really respected about FB product orgs generally was that really did ship things quickly. I used to joke that the smallest unit of time at Google was a quarter. God help you if you eneded another team (under a different VP) to do something. You'd have to spend a quarter arguing with them to get them to add it to their OKRs for the following quarter.
At FB the timeline for launching a new thing to a limited audience was measured in weeks. The biggest barrier usually was the weekly build cycle for the blue app. The release cycle for Web was S-tier and (IMHO) the people who worked on the infra for Web were generally god tier. This was another reason why IG doggedly sticking with Python just created problems.
There are many thigns you can criticize Meta for (eg the stupid crypto, the billions wasted on VR) but the Web Foundation and Ent teams were god tier and I'll die on that hill.
Anyway, even back then the ML teams and infra, not to put too fine a point on it, sucked (IMHO). Newsfeed was OK but the recommendations for a lot of things like videos just sucked. All of this was mainly because it all relied on daily offline jobs. And then Tiktok came along and showed everybody (including Youtube) just what a bad job they were doing at recommendations. And don't get me started on the IG Reels dumpster fire.
Oh ok, I thought of another one: Messenger. I knew some smart people on Messenger but overall the product and the infra were, again, a dumpster fire.
I thought that was YouTube's business model.
Now if you'll excuse me I need to purchase some phony dick pills and diabetes snake oil to go with my fake NASA-designed air conditioner.
Don’t forget failed, mentally ill, manic rebrands that cost billions and go nowhere.
Oh, and enabling human traffickers.
Turned out he was schtupping the vp of the design company (his wife told the admin assistant during the divorce)
Kubernetes has held back cluster technology for the last decade and prevented a better alternative for smaller companies or companies that can't piss away monopoly profits on unwieldy technology and process. It would have been much better had somebody tried to make an open source product based on IBM's old Parallel Sysplex but there gotta be patents in there (now expired though!)
As much as people like to complain, React has come out on top in a highly competitive market. I've looked at a lot of systems for building UI objects which look superficially similar like Microsoft's XAML and Oracle's FXML and React's system is by far the most simple and flexible... An example that shows you can apply the ideas in On Lisp to any language which has basic functional programming practices with just a tiny compiler tweak on top to make it fluent.
Can you elaborate on why these are at all comparable techs to use as a developer?
React seems to be the frontrunner in FE, but what do you see the BE equivalent to be?
With just a little bit of hyperbole:
The culture of Google is that you hire "the best" developers (say top 0.1%) and hamstring them with process and cumbersome tools so that you need 10x as many of them as another company would need and pay them 3x market rates, but it is OK because (1) at the scale they work at they can amortize the cost over a large user base and (2) they make monopoly products. Google's systems are highly scalable, I grant that, but they have the first mover disadvantage that their foundations are first-generation and not based on experience and still slowing them down... but the market can't discipline them.
Facebook on the other hand, cares about internal DX, sees it a problem when developers are stuck with cumbersome processes, and greases the skids. They benefit from huge scale and monopoly profits but Zuck is keeping more in his pocket than he would be if he did things like Google.
The problem with React is that mediocre developers can use it to build big things that are too big for them to handle. The problem with Kubernetes is that above-average developers can use it to build small things they can't handle. And the scalability of Kube is more than almost all of the industry needs. That is, a system like what Hazelcast was before it became an analytics play could support clusters of 30 or so big nodes (two racks) and there are probably just a few 100 systems in the worlds that really need to get bigger than that.
Rather than two competitive products I think React and Kube are both market dominant products that reveal the engineering culture, values and impact of the two organizations.
I can say that when I first started with React I thought it sucked and looked at Vue and Svelte and similar things. My take on all of them was that they made the internal frameworks I was using to build very complex RIAs in the 2005-2010 time frame look like something that fell off a UFO.
I first thought Vue reflected the way I thought about conventional "webby" applications particularly in terms of treating lists as a first-class object. I eventually learned with React how to draw absolutely anything, even whole 3-d worlds!
I guess what I'll say about Svelte is "if you make such a radical change in your framework did you really believe in it?" Early on I stuck to controlled forms in React because uncontrolled forms seemed structurally unstable (add one too many features and it all breaks) and then I discovered
which is easy and very high performing. What I really like about React is not so much the DX or UX but rather the way it uses functions to seemingly transform a language into something else in a conceptually simple way... And how it solves the problem of composing components written by different people and organizations to the extent that we've now got the terrible problem of managing an app that has 50 third party components and 5 CSS management frameworks.
How is using talented software engineers to track users and design addictive algorithms any good? React might be a nice side effect, but it's certainly not the first thing when I think of Meta.
Kubernetes is the industry standard cluster orchestrator for a reason - it's fantastic
(I know useContext isn't great for state management, but I've worked on a web application where useContext was used to store complex global state).
Specifically I wrote a bunch of React components for making little biosignals applications that can (say) show two people's heartrate from bluetooth LE and show my breathing based on a strap i am wearing and another person's breathing based on a $20 radar from China.
I can pretty easily snap together the components and the system that feeds the state to the components by writing code. It works great, it's not that hard to do, it looks great.
But: I really wish I could make something where I could drag and drop display and data acquisition and processing components like LabView. Actually I know a lot about how to do the dynamic processing (Hint: read the Dragon book, not On Lisp) but React doesn't support dynamically assembled components... But I know Javascript systems can because I was writing them 2005-2010 back when browsers didn't have async and all the great affordances they offer now.
I built my own action framework that gives me the ability to use Jotai getters to read atom data, launch asynchronous javascript, and then write to atom data via Jotai setters without ever having to fuss with useEffect myself. Jotai just handles the messy state transition work. My components used to be a jumble of DOM event handler, business logic, and markup, and now the business logic is all extracted to the separate action components.
React makes it hard to test business logic in isolation, and I am hoping my action framework could do a better job of that.
But what I don’t understand is how screen recording / keyboard recording is useful AI training data?
It seems like a lot cost and a lot of pissing off people for something that is actually not very valuable.
Obviously this isn't as true for things where it truly matters - encryption software, financial software, etc. - but it's amazing how little engineering excellent has to do with a company's success.
That's because your engineering career coincides with a race to the bottom, where advertising-saturated, FOMO-afflicted consumers demonstrated a preference for accumulating as many cheap/free/subsidized things that they could over a few durable, valuable things that genuinely benefit them.
It wasn't always that way, and if the economy does encounter a strong correction, it could very well change again.
There's always the option of getting rid of all the engineers working on new stuff, and having a small support staff. Often times, customers would even prefer that.
So, let's see, the top tech companies in revenue are Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and some of the fastest growing ones are OpenAI and Anthropic.
Do you know what all these have in common? They give extremely high compensation even compared to other large companies (microsoft is a bit of an exception here).
So you think they just do this out of the goodness of their hearts, that these kind CEOs who would lay off tons of people on a whim, don't think engineering matters, but are paying 300k, 400k, 600k, 800k to software engineers?
Like the feeds not showing any posts, like a login wall on everything, like... god. Any Zuckerberg products
maybe, but I disagree. a lot of businesses - keep sinking money into social ads - yet don't get results coz if you don't know what u r doing, Meta will use a massive amount of ur budget on your current customers instead of bringing in new customers.
which is also the reason Amazon Ads Unit has grown lately - it works. Whereas paid social / paid search are becoming relics. yeah they might print money in the near future - but the full assault from native ads, media n amazon etc where first party data/pixels count n you also respect privacy.
I know this - cz I own a small martech business that's a competitor to ga4 n expanding into native ads.
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?
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.
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 think you might have Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn) mixed up with Reed Hastings (founder of Netflix). :)
The acronym is outdated. I don't really see a difference between FAANG or Nvidia/Stripe/Uber/etc in terms of brand recognition.
And also it depends on where you land org-wise. What you actually are working on is more important than the brand name
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...
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.
Why would you ever do such a thing on a device controlled by your employer?
I guess there's a whole generation of devs who don't remember the Microsoft antitrust trial, and haven't learned the "anything you do at work may come out in discovery" lesson.
It is in fact common to do personal things on work PCs.
The senior manager spending 5 days visiting that foreign office is logging into his personal netflix account, and video calling his wife and kids. He ain't carrying a second laptop to do it.
That middle manager, with a report who needs a widget delivered tomorrow, and purchasing aren't fast enough to get the order in? He's logging into his personal account and paying with his personal card, then making an expense claim.
That in-office worker wearing headphones? Good chance he's logged into his personal music streaming account. Maybe he uses youtube music, so he's logged into his entire personal google account too.
And the sales guy who's constantly stuck in hotels for business travel? Oh boy you don't want to look his 11pm web browsing.
There are other reasons one might reasonably object to keystroke tracking, of course.
I don't even like doing stuff like this on my phone.
Do they go to Apple Store and login it to their personal account on the showcase iphone and yell at the genius employees?
So, yeah, people do absolutely braindead shit with their company-furnished equipment. It's fucking mind-boggling.
It’s a matter of time before the regulatory hammer falls on them and they’re hemmed in via civil courts due to damages. Many of the civil suits they’re losing are petty weak cases showing juries and judges literally hate meta. These are signs that their revenues are short term money grabs due to blindly chasing iRev at the cost of literally everything else.
Even hacking they only really follow through on if their large business credit extensions are at risk or chargebacks. Debit and direct funding isn’t pursued because they’re not loss liable - if it’s literal theft via debit cards, it’s not a priority. If it’s their own money via credit that’s refundable, they’re all hands on deck.
This will all blow back on them at some point and that point isn’t far aware. Courts, governments, banks, they’re all starting to notice the lawlessness and pure avarice. The consequences will severely impair their ads business, require them to undergo worse consent, oversight, and audit that waving an AI hand at won’t be sufficient, especially when the courts are concerned as judges are especially skeptical of AI solutions to court orders.
Their only out is to find another business model, which they’ve been trying to do without success since Facebook was first launched.
If you worked in TV in the early days, especially when TV was highly experimental and the standards changed every year, you probably did a lot of hands-on engineering or otherwise worked closely with engineers. Today, there is very little engineering in television.
I suspect the same thing is happening with social media: The product is mature and will have less and less engineering problems to solve.
Of course, with how mediocrely those side projects have been going, I’m not surprised Meta is turning to layoffs. They seriously over hired and never really found a good use for all those engineers.
You can probably do it with 2,500 engineers. Maybe even fewer.
Zuck only cares about features, or new features. He probably likes power too, but I'm less certain than that. To curry favour with Zuck all you need to do is make a new feature, ideally using AI/AR.
The problem is, zuckerberg trusts no-one, so he is surrounded by familiar faces that act as his inner court. The problem for meta and the rest of the world, is that most of them are utter brainless dicks.
Cox is utterly useless, he has the cognitive faculties of a flea. the rest of the product council has been ruthless bred for agreeing, rather than making good product decisions. Worse still they are either wilfully blind or just blind to the second order effects that their actions take.
Boz, in person is nice. Boz as a leader is a vapid, lacks insight fails to provide actual direction and lets his ego bruise too often. He was 2 years to late to NFTs, Regularly picked fights with juniors in the comments.
The other elephant in the room is the monetisation department. They are basically the drivers of most of the problems in facebook.
Notification fatigue? yeah probably them,
AI slop to boomers? deffo
Rage bait? yup
Fraud? totally profitable.
There was a concerted effort by engineers to try and make meta better (see sophie Zhang), however as time moved forward those that cared were diluted by those that were just there. They recruited far too agressivly in 2020. we had too many people then, but "there was a plan"
They started firing people in 2022, and never stopped. It was clear that Zuck wanted to be a big man, and doesn't really understand how to run his company (Sandberg is a terrible person, but a good leader, even though shes a monumental hypocrite. He saw her as she is, and assumed thats what the rest of the world saw.)
So there’s really not a lot of growth areas for them? Their biggest growth seems to have been acquisitions, not new features.
Maybe data labeling is like RTO - an intentional way to force attrition.
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
Problem? This is the best news I've heard in a while.
its unclear to me why they need their model to be the best at coding (maybe to build an internal technical moat?)
This is the fast track to being next in a round of layoffs. If your manager does not know you, they won’t vouch for you when it comes time to toss people out of the airlock. You are in a vulnerable position.
This is one of those things where a (tech) celebrity founder was permitted to blew up a high-performing engineering culture. If shareholders knew the nuances of this they'd demand his ouster. His leadership has been lacking in merit, excellence, and intelligence.
I think the main proponent was Bosworth, not Wang
The short term pay for the lunacy of working there is not a sensible trade-off for decent engineers.
Aside from having the sword of Damocles over you at all times because Zuck has lost his mind, there is a sense he has had 1 too many failures after Metaverse and they are seriously floundering in AI, and their core products (Ad Manager) has a very poor image, even with non-technical users.
So it's not even a sure bet you will even get a short term monetary payoff
But I put up with it, just like everyone else, because it’s still amazing ROI when you get it working right. And there’s no other choice if you want access to these platforms with billions of potential customers.
Besides top 2 AI labs, don't they outpay everyone?
Employees were told to work from home and were sent emails at 4AM informing them they've been let go. Those that weren't impacted have software on their computer that tracks their every move. Remaining employees can now opt out of being tracked at work for half an hour [1]. Meanwhile, @Meta is raking in record profits.
ClickUp reduced headcount by 22% - and the CEO tweeted that the "business is the strongest it's ever been". In the same tweet, the CEO motivated this cut by their intention to build the "100X organization" ...[2] A week before the layoffs, they posted this video [3].
Webflow fired most of its staff, with some finding out about it after more than 24 hours [4] (while being on a locked visa, which means they'll have to leave the country!).
Cloudflare laid off 1,100 employees (~20% of its workforce) [5] and hired over 1,000 interns (one could say replaced).
My question for anyone still working at these companies:
Why are you still working there?
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/technology/meta-layoffs-a...
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93x0k194yno
[2]: https://x.com/DJ_CURFEW/status/2057522382315929802
[3]: https://www.tiktok.com/@clickup/video/7638681657058364702
[4]: https://nypost.com/2026/05/28/tech/bloodbath-at-california-t...
> I talked with several engineers in infra orgs, who had 30-50% of their teams drafted into the ADO org. And in some cases, it was the best engineers who left.
> On Tuesday, Meta’s Chief Information and Security Officer (CISO), Guy Rosen, announced his departure.
This Guy was here since 2013, after his mobile tracking app Onavo was acquired, VP of Trust & Safety / Integrity during the high-stakes times of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, handling platform abuse and election interference during a very "yuge" election cycle.
With that goes the accumulated ethics, philosophy, and tribal knowledge that drives organizational cybersecurity and risk, 3 very important factors that can't be automated away or even openly spoken about. This sounds like a massive change to decision making that is larger than engineering.
See also Twitter when Ol' Musky rolled in.
I'm not sure how this matters compared to the other platform companies. Kindle has such a small niche market and the Kindle "platform" hardly registers any impact.
Almost every company is all in on AI so what makes Meta particularly bad?
Facebook has been around for 20+ years now. The youthful exuberance of Web 2.0 has given way to the exuberance of an even greater more disruptive AI era.
The problem is, it leads to blind imitation. And it's obvious who he's imitating.
It's Elon Musk. From Zuck's perspective, all he ever did was figure out how to monetize a PhP web app - something my buddy in high school could create for our M.U.N. club. Zuck spends millions on VR glasses, low income high schools, 100,000 software engineers, and all he has is the same webapp + some monopolistic acquisitions and a loving wife and child.
Elon is a total dick to everyone, impregnates his executives, gets high on ketamine, does the Nazi salute on live television, but, importantly, launched more satellites into space than any country on Earth. For less than the price of a shitty VR webapp that 20 people used, Elon will solve Global Warming and bring humans into the outer reaches of the solar system. The duality of man.
If Elon started pissing his pants in public or flinging poo at his enemies, Zuckerberg would start doing the same thing.
Haven't you tried?
> Quotas are handed down to managers for the splits of the workforce to be put in each ‘bucket’, and the internal politics gets heated as managers try to get their reports into higher buckets.
Curious, why can't the management assigns budgets (or resources in general) to individual teams? That is, it is the managers who are responsible for the resources that their teams get, and the budget is tied to the importance of the "team" that each manager owns. In that way, all the performance review will be local to each team. As a manager, I'd be responsible for the output and importance of my team, and I answer to my manager because they will allocate the budget (or resources in general). Recursively, my team members will answer to me and I don't have to justify who gets rewarded by how much to my peers, except that there will be some form of check and balances.
How Meta manages their perf review seems to set up their managers to be ineffective.
That agency has a price, though. Whatever level you get it at, your boss will not give a single crap about any excuses for why you didn't deliver. A meteor could have hit your building, and it wouldn't matter.
Holy shit, talking about perverse incentives!
There's nothing at Meta that other companies (engineers) haven't already solved. It's not impossible to load to millions of pictures per second and have them displayed to billions of users.
Just the other day, there was a blog post talking about how we should stop idolizing these companies because they're not doing anything groundbreaking or innovating. But now we're doing just that: expecting an ad company to ... do groundbreaking engineering?
Say what you will. Zuckerberg for all that we make fun of him is an insanely successful software guy and businessman. Being good at software is easier, but being strong at both is rare, and he's a multi-billionaire from it. The dude is wildly successful and no matter how much we hate on him or his orgs for it, the people love it. And the advertisers love it. People love Meta's products and even folks in AI governance and safety fields get the Meta glasses and actively use them.
He's built a company that's pretty much self sustaining and you don't need 1000s of engineers for that. Maybe that fact is hitting too close to home?
It was a 10% cut but it hit SWE pretty hard, looking at partner teams it was around 15-20%. Another 10% were "drafted" to this bullshit data labeling org.
On partner teams, attrition seems to be 10-20% over the last couple months (in addition to prior layoff numbers), maybe higher. Will probably go up again after the next vest. Right now it seems like internal comms has shifted where they're begging people to not leave and saying how they will try to improve things.
There have been several reorgs recently. Doesn't seem like anyone knows what the fuck is happening. Teams are significantly smaller than what they were before and it seems like consolidation should be happening, but leadership is in this weird state of paralysis where they're just leaving shit in the current half-reorged state and not doing anything.
So tl;dr, right now it's the biggest dumpster fire I've ever seen in my life. Feels like I'm watching the Titanic sink
software is now free, at least for the people that know the proper incantations required to manifest it into existence. software-only companies have no future. sending old-world SWEs into the undiscovered country results in high costs to the unprepared SWEs and high costs to their financiers who lose control as soon as the boots on the ground realize the wildfire is too close for comfort and new winds are blowing
the only viable way to separate assets from liabilities (payroll) fast enough for large corps to catch up with the growing number of claude-unicorn centaurs, and small herds of them, will be bankruptcy (could be wrong, i'm no lawyer)
right now they're freaking out over attrition and making a bunch of posts internally about how they'll "do better"
Apple: yes
Google: yes
X: yes
Samsung: yes
Amazon: yes
For details, read the article https://axbom.com/iceberg/ and try the iceberg simulator https://joshdata.me/iceberger.html or read the tweet that started it https://xcancel.com/GlacialMeg/status/1362557149147058178
So funny how people overlook Jensen Huang repeatedly. As if NVIDIA wasn't big tech, or Jensen wasn't a founder, or an engineer...
"Things are going so fast and we need to catch up. Yesterday."
But you still have humans working for you. I doubt these label people are putting in their best efforts...
From there, the natural executive question becomes: "How do I make as much of my engineering organization as possible fit into that 30%?"
Meta employees being upset about being tracked is the height of irony.
I'm not going to defend Meta's recent practices but any expectation of privacy when using an employer's device is forfeit. I thought this was basic common sense?
[1] https://gist.github.com/vladak/c0abb6856d7902291f760be467b24...
Getting the right people on the bus is the most difficult task on the world.
And then these people end up in places that cannot utilize their full potential. Everyone is worse off.
no are there bootstrapped / funded startups by Meta alumni hitting the shelve every week.
I see it more as a part of this common, historical trend among humans and other animals: - core, leadership figures with power, like to push their views and beliefs on others and people will just oddly follow it like in lock step and in tribal hypnosis. - I believe we are seeing this. - I believe we are seeing this from the world's leaders in lockstep, to extract unprecedented resources and take additional power; and protect themselves at the expense of everyone else
It seems to me to match similar trends we've had in major periods of instability and revolution throughout human history. WW2, even WW1, showed this by the bourgeoise class. I think enough of them were able to hide and get away with it, and we are seeing a repeat of that by the next generations of their families. Theres my conspiracy theory of the day!
However, I recently borrowed a Quest 2, mainly to play Half-Life: Alyx, and once I got over using that fucking awful Windows app to set it all up properly, I’ve been pretty blown away by how good the thing is for the price. Granted, I’m basically just using it to launch into SteamVR, but it’s a solid bit of hardware. Maybe that’s just the result of the work Carmack and his team did there and acquisition of talent after Oculus?
Just thought I’d be fair and give a perspective that they seem to have made at least one thing that’s pretty damn good.
“[Ll]esus take the wheel”