Currently at Meta. This place has always been a bit ruthless in the 8+ years I've been around to observe. But the article is accurate.
Never seen people this universally fed up. I thought tech was too cushy for it to happen, but there's serious collective action posting out in the open all over the place.
It's also never been more cutthroat, backstabby, scope-grabby, political, and uncertain. There seems to be a flywheel in effect where top talent exits and those who will drown each other to stay afloat are all that remain. It's somehow leapfrogging Oracle's culture even.
I also work at Meta. The chaos and instability is awful. But I think they could fire pretty much everyone and the ads business would still continue to grow at nearly the same rate.
I think it will take a very long time for leadership to feel the effects of what they've done.
> I also work at Meta. The chaos and instability is awful. But I think they could fire pretty much everyone and the ads business would still continue to grow at nearly the same rate.
I spent 5 years at Facebook (2013-18), and I can guarantee you that if you fired the sales teams, revenue would take a pretty large hit.
More generally my friend who was there till last year (at a pretty senior manager level) said that once the AAP thing happened with Apple, it got really really nasty.
Like, every company tends towards the median of it's geographies over time but Facebook was a pretty special place to work at back in the day, and it looks like a lot of that has been lost now.
the entre into the culture via his wife isn't anything to shake a stick at, but don't anthropomorphize the Zuck -- he's there because there are 1 billion people who already live in a surveillance state.
cheap programmers, long 996 hours, and access to the biggest market in the world.
> The median of its employees’ geographies is China. That’s how it got worse than your average maturing Bay Area company
I mean, this was true when I joined in 2013. One guy I worked with was the only non-Chinese person working with the targeting team. So I really don't think it can be reduced to such a simple explanation.
To be honest, Facebook acquired lots more US business culture, and that's (personally) where I think lots of the rot came from.
Some Facebook ad forums have gone from frustration to extreme hyperbole (e.g. death penalty for Meta execs). The "you're doing it wrong" replies have also shifted to more of "having the same problem". We would like to advertise again on Meta, but it looks quite scary to start again. We've even received two bills from Meta, though we have not advertised since 2020. Contested one and got a discount, the other was smaller and I didn't contest. Trying to disconnect everything currently.
I'm guessing you have 0 insight into the work that the ads, ranking, apps, and sales teams do to keep the gravy train flowing and even expanding 30% every year. If Meta fired even just half the ranking workers, the recommendation models (both ads and feeds) would very quickly become stale and start shedding many Fortune 500 companies worth of revenue.
When I read parent say "pretty much everyone", I assume the hypothetically not-cut people are still a thousands large skeleton crew keeping the cash cow fed and happy. What did you think they meant? 3 execs and an janitor?
I'm sure whatever your role at facebook is, it is very important. There are people who recognize how valuable your contributions were/are/will be. You probably won't find that validation on HN.
> There seems to be a flywheel in effect where top talent exits and those who will drown each other to stay afloat are all that remain.
This is the death spiral of a company. Things start to get bad, the best people with the most external options leave, which makes things worse... the people left behind are either those with no other options, or people who strive in the backstabbing environment of a company in decline.
It's easy to keep employees happy with good pay and benefits and a nice work environment, as long as the work is reasonably ethical and life-affirming and generally compatible with human well-being. Meta hasn't been any of those things in quite a while.
That good pay , benefit, nice work environment comes from destroying environment, communities, lying, cheating and so many other such wonderful things.
People do like to remain oblivious to all. Some go even further to blame company for their immoral activities but remain firmly in place as income from those activities is just too good to leave.
Why does anyone want to work for companies run by such awful people in the first place? I saw me CEO make up a whole new persona to suck up the new nazi administration I would be gone the next day.
I also hear from people I know at Meta that there is a very strong push to use AI to speed up developer work. One person I know complains that their velocity is slowed down because they have to fix some of the slop that gets checked in as code review is too lax about AI generated code.
My guess is that if the planned layoffs remove these "underperforming" devs that are actually fixing AI introduced bugs at the detriment of their own velocity, that will hopefully lead to a correction that AI isn't actually dramatically increasing efficiency, but rather that it trades efficiency amongst individuals with likely a slight positive trend in efficiency overall.
Interestingly, since I'm also from an academic background, it seems professors have leaned in heavily on AI and are essentially using their PhD students as filters for AI ideas (which have a MUCH lower signal to noise in that domain).
Interesting times (speaking as an NLP researcher).
It's like this (or was before I left) in Capital One. So I think it's a universal big corporation type of thing. And beyond that its probably a bigger part of the trend of break down in dignity and morals.
In the current economic and political nightmare, it's highly unlikely. They should have unionised during the zirp era when they had all the power. Meta has all the power now.
The best time to strike is when you are strong not when you are weak. All those golden handcuffs were highly effective.
Serious question - I know this will come off as inflammatory but I am genuinely curious. Do you ever talk to coworkers about the addictive, polarizing nature of Meta recommendation feed algorithms? There is pretty solid research around teen health (specially girls) around how many problems it causes.
Is the pay just so good you turn a blind eye? Honestly, I can understand that if I am being honest. But I don't see as many people being clear about this. I assume people are delusional on their impact for the dollar signs are so big they will look away from the hurt they help cause.
Not OP and never worked at Meta, but according to Sarah Wynn Williams’ Careless People, the incentive is not so much the pay, it is the options. If you get in and leave before x number of years or get fired (not 100% sure how it works) you will lose the golden ”never having to work again” -ticket. Apparently it keeps people pretty meek and helps silence the jiminy Cricket in the backgrpund.
Not really how it works anymore. Everyone just gets 4 year RSU grants with an even vesting schedule and no lockout period, and it has been that way for a long time now. I've never really heard of anyone at Meta getting options (maybe possible for execs?).
That said, with enough stock growth, the stacking RSU grants can still enter into "never having to work again" territory depending on your role/level and how many grants you've been able to stack.
Frequently! It used to be tolerated (even encouraged) internally, and many people are pushing hard against such things all the time. These days it's a good way to get targeted for layoffs though, so I'm assuming our days are numbered.
There are a lot of folks who also really do not care and are just here for the money though. The large majority, if I were to guess.
Thanks for the answer. Hmm, that is what I expected, but that's totally logical but a shame that people who have any amount of self-reflection on their work's impact are the first targeted for layoffs.
I lived and worked in SV for several years. Basically people don’t see anything they do as wrong and have no concept of shame.
It’s a combination of learned obedience to authority and greed.
You just take a bunch of people who made all A’s in school by doing whatever they were told by authority figures, give them new authority figures who give them new “homework” (monetize suicidal ideation), and the money to buy a car they can post on Insta and you’ve got a BigTech workforce.
I never thought about it as obedience to authority, but ya maybe that is it. I still kind it would fall under the greed bucket where they are willing to submit to their corporate kings if it means they get more RSUs and the new car and the bigger house. Social media might be the single largest factor in the current disintegration of community and connectedness at scale.
This correlates with the information I gleaned yesterday about the US education system from a very exasperated australian psychologist [0]. Apparently learned obedience is a goal from very early education.
Is Zuck just too...neurodivergent or lacking in social awareness or low EQ or whatever the case may be to understand morale? Or just so cut-throat/trusting that people who don't currently work there want the META paycheck badly enough that even if morale is horrible they can just backfill departures?
I have a low but not infrequent amount of direct exposure to him and honestly I think it's ~30% he is extremely ruthlessly competitive at any cost, and ~70% every semi-reasonable idea he has gets immediately twisted into cargo-culting, empire-building nonsense by the VP layer.
I wouldn't blame company culture on neurodivergents. It's explained by a stereotypical ruthless flavor of business, which reinforced itself with the culture they hired and nurtured.
The company has been known as kinda sketchy almost continuously since it was founded, yet people went there because it paid the most money.
If leadership is now thinking that an executive "ideas person", plus a small execution team fortified with AI, can bang out a product more quickly than the massive army of corporate workers they've been feeding at top of the market rates, and at the same quality level as the previous inefficient bureaucracy managed... isn't that plausibly correct?
Now, the company just needs to be the best-paying job available to enough of those workers. And the company believes this is getting easier for the company, due to the state of the job market. The workers who remain will remain motivated by money.
And the company may think they're not losing anything of value, since they knew that their culture was already sick.
Example: They think they weren't getting creative, aligned, diligent brilliance, amidst all the backstabbing and politics they'd created, and so mechanically executing on an executive ideas person's vision yields the same product result, faster.
From the outside, I think this shouldn't be a surprise, nor blamed on possible neurodivergence of individuals.
(Of course this isn't my own philosophy about morale and effective product teams, and I wouldn't want to work at a company like that. But you can see some company cultures from thousands of miles away.)
> The company has been known as kinda sketchy almost continuously since it was founded, yet people went there because it paid the most money.
It was literally started as a way of creeping on cute girls.
It's never not been sketchy. I say that, despite the fact that it enables me to connect with > 1,000 friends across my continent, many of whom I hadn't had contact with in decades. Things can be both bad and good.
I think that Zuckerberg is driven by numbers/analytics and the competition.
He was lucky enough to be made a king in this world before he was fully adult, he is likely unaware of many of the realities we take for granted, and why would he care? Money is good.
Same for most executives and upper management being unable to relate because companies stopped promoting within and no longer reward loyalty and seniority. They see you as something that could be dismissed instead of someone that might run or heavily influence the company one day.
I personally believe that he is just piece of shit. Unhinged, greedy, selfish one. Some people are made this way, some people evolve into that state. I don't really think it's some sort of diagnosis.
It is a schoolyard bully mindset in adult language. Someone acts differently than your idealized version of yourself in the same situation -> insinuate that they are not just different, but they are so abnormal as to constitute a medical condition.
They bought out Instagram because it was shaping out to be a huge competitor, so I think that business would have grown to be a multibillion dollar one regardless.
It was definitely very smart to buy them out when they did.
It's really hard to tell if an idea is bad without trying it out first. Zuck's runway was unusually long. And who knows? Maybe he should have stuck with it a while longer. We cannot say for certain that it would always have failed.
> Maybe he should have stuck with it a while longer. We cannot say for certain that it would always have failed.
Well, their execution was also very expensive and yet garbage, which is crazy with how many insanely talented people they had to work on it at one point or the other. It seems pretty clear cut as executive failure.
We need to stop suggesting that someone who is "neurodivergent" is more likely to be a sociopathic asshole. The two are not related at all.
Back in the day you could mention in passing "oh that guy is on a spectrum", but it was always because they were awkward and quiet, not anti-social.
Zuck has spent his life from birth in a walled garden. He cannot relate to normal human emotions. In a way, that's not his fault, but we showered people like him with praise for being "geniuses" and "visionaries", which did not help matters.
Someone who is neurodivergent (which is itself an umbrella term) may very well struggle to accurately detect the level of morale amongst their coworkers (or signs of low morale), or may have a more difficult time fostering the level of closeness to their coworkers to build the trust with those people that they'd be vulnerable and share their feelings of low morale.
That all may be true, but we have other data points. There are multiple stories of Zuckerberg being warned about the dangers of "X" and "Y". "This is going to harm children", for example. He repeatedly overrides those concerns and gives the go-ahead. This is not some poor soul who has trouble connecting with people, this is a sociopath.
I'm "neurodivergent" but when it comes to empathy/sympathy, I tend toward the over-sensitive side rather than oblivious (as does my son, who is diagnosed with ASD Type 1).
I don't take any issue with that being used in this context, though. I mean, I wouldn't really in any context as long as the person writing it isn't intending malice -- they're just words, people can misuse/abuse them -- but specifically this context. "Neurodivergent" covers a lot of ground, but in reference to Mr. Zuckerberg, nearly all of us[0] pictured one of two things: Data (Star Trek) or Data with Borg accessories attached. Which you chose largely depended on your opinion of him, but both had an android character who has no ability to feel emotions or understand the emotions that others feel.
... and since good communication largely rests on people's understanding of your message, I think OP's word choice was largely sound. :)
[0] As in those of you who, like me, have never been in the same city at the same time as the guy so we know "him" based on what we read about him.
The word is, Zuck is going through his midlife crisis (42 yo) and wants a tougher, more driven, and more masculine environment. Zuck has been pro-Trump for a while, and palling around with MMA guys. He's also open to importing 996 culture because of his appreciation of China, which stems from his Chinese wife.
Zuck probably has ADHD (or something like that). If you have experienced it or know people that do then you know that you tend to have tons of random ideas that seem good in the moment but a few days later you realize weren’t that great.
Now imagine every time one of these ideas happen a 2000+ person org immediately starts pivoting to work on it as its top priority.
You literally work for a guy who, talking about the user data he dubiously acquired, that said "they trust me, dumb fucks".
It's hard to feel sorry for workers who chose that road, the writing was on the wall.
And to be very well paid to create the biggest spying tech on the planet, making doomscroll addictive, ads that serve scams, AI slop everywhere, and being accused of having participated in election manipulation.
At some point, I call it poetic justice, and I wish there were more of that.
Believe it or not, I agree. I don't sleep particularly great, but I went in clear eyed that in the worst case I'd be helping a company that should not own "the next platform" attempt to do exactly that.
But in the best case, I'd be working in a low ROI area -- actively draining money from the parts of the company that are most malicious -- primarily ensuring that assembly lines and skills at Goertek stay hot to carry the XR devices I'm passionate about through a nadir in the broader industry's investment. A mercenary agreement for the company and myself to both advance our goals.
Yeah, I'm inclined to think people can grow. There's a reason juveniles convicted of crimes, even serious crimes, should be given a second chance and are given a second chance in most civilized places.
College is where things start to firm up for most people, though. I don't think I've ever known anyone who was a terrible person in college who turned out good.
I just grow tired of hearing people trot out a thing Zuck said in college, when there are so many far worse things he's said and done since then, and with the weight of tremendous wealth and influence backing them.
The thing he said in college was shitty, and indicative of a spoiled, entitled, child of wealth and privilege, but saying it was basically harmless. Worse things might be said at the corner sports bar on any given night in any city in the country.
Never seen people this universally fed up. I thought tech was too cushy for it to happen, but there's serious collective action posting out in the open all over the place.
It's also never been more cutthroat, backstabby, scope-grabby, political, and uncertain. There seems to be a flywheel in effect where top talent exits and those who will drown each other to stay afloat are all that remain. It's somehow leapfrogging Oracle's culture even.