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Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

639 points by throwarayes

by ironman1478

10 subcomments

Having worked at meta, something I noticed is that the orgs that were well run were ones that were bought. WhatsApp, reality, insta, etc. I worked in an org that was not associated with those products and was purely homegrown and it was awful. Things got done but horribly inefficiently due to over hiring and extreme requirement and schedule shifts.
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.

by throw-the-towel

11 subcomments

I think the gloating in this thread is very misguided. Meta is evil, sure, but that's not the point. The point is that this kind of AI psychosis might be the new normal for our industry, or at least one of the new normals. My last workplace absolutely did a jump in toxicity when the CEO got obsessed with AI, instituted token leaderboards, told us all to drop all non-AI work for a time, etc. We were no Meta.

by jmuguy

2 subcomments

I do think you have to admire how almost comically insane Zuckerberg is to do stuff like this. If Facebook was being run by someone normal what would happen is it would spend the next 20 years pissing away everything slowly as social media advertising became less and less relevant. But not with Zuckerberg at the helm. He will burn that place to the ground trying to find some way to remain important. Its surprising that people working there apparently thought they weren't going to get burned.

by fabian2k

18 subcomments

> 30-50% of engineers on core teams have been forcefully reassigned to data labeling and RLHF, upsetting folks even more.
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.

by spamizbad

3 subcomments

Lots of people blame Zuckerberg, but my own view aligns with the author in that much of this is falls on Alexandr Wang's shoulders (Scale AI's founder). It's perhaps somewhat ironic that the "MEI" guy (Merit, Excellence, Intelligence) was permitted to poach high-performing subject matter experts from key engineering orgs and reassigned them to data labeling - something that, let's be honest, is not where you want to allocate your top performers at an org like Meta.
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.

by kens

0 subcomment

On a complete tangent: there's a drawing of an iceberg halfway through the article, the typical vertical shape with 10% above the surface. It turns out that icebergs don't float that way; they rotate until they are mostly horizontal. It's one of those things that once I found out, I see wrong icebergs everywhere.
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

by chvid

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Facebook and Instagram are such strong businesses that they could completely stop development work and the businesses would still be unbeatable monopolies for years to come.
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.

by gwbas1c

3 subcomments

I think there is a shift here that a lot of people don't recognize.
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.

by PaulHoule

6 subcomments

Sad. I thought Meta did a lot of things right when it came to using engineers, especially compared to Google. If I had a choice between React (Facebook) and Kubernetes (Google) I would pick the former anyday.
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.

by ux4

1 subcomments

Engineering org aside, there's something much larger here burgeoning under the surface:
> 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.

by AJRF

2 subcomments

I live in $MAJOR_CITY, and Meta is a not a viable workplace for serious engineers anymore.
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

by throwarayes

6 subcomments

If you get a FAANG job you need to think like a professional athlete. Save most of what you make. Assume it’s not going to last.
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.

by burnte

0 subcomment

When your employer has a vested interest in you using a specific tool above all others, even if it's worse, then success is no longer measured with a rational, objective metric. Once you do not have objective metrics to gauge success, you will always fail in the long, and the long run tends not to be very long. In every single company I've ever worked for or with, I've never seen a "I demand it be done like this" policy ever succeed. I've seen it close businesses, but never succeed.

by KaiserPro

3 subcomments

Former meta bellend here:
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.)

by bcatanzaro

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"A founder-engineer driven company. Facebook is one of the few Big Tech firms whose founder is an engineer, and still is the CEO. Netflix is the other one where founder and co-CEO Reed Hastings was also a software engineer before starting the company. Amazon was the other example of this until recently, but it’s not the case at Google or Apple."
So funny how people overlook Jensen Huang repeatedly. As if NVIDIA wasn't big tech, or Jensen wasn't a founder, or an engineer...

by rgavuliak

2 subcomments

Well paid engineers compare their experience to a labour death camp just confirms how out of touch they are.

by Groxx

1 subcomments

Because it's safe to do so now, anyone on a visa is immediately in an extremely uncomfortable position if they lose their job. They won't leave. And anyone else who does voluntarily gives up on layoff packages.
See also Twitter when Ol' Musky rolled in.

by simonw

1 subcomments

Anyone at Meta able to confirm or expand on the details in this?

by jdalgetty

0 subcomment

They probably just don’t need them anymore. Obviously they are confident that their AI workers are doing a good enough job, and my feeling is that they aren’t planning on creating any groundbreaking new software anytime soon that requires the same number of human engineers to do the work. I think it’s potentially a canary in the coal mine type of warning for the rest of the industry. If a company like Meta doesn’t think it needs the headcount, then other big companies will likely soon follow.

by vanuatu

2 subcomments

"It’s literally the gulag" - okay this was a funny comment
its unclear to me why they need their model to be the best at coding (maybe to build an internal technical moat?)

by marssaxman

2 subcomments

"If you log into your personal bank account, does the tool track you? What about when you’re writing a personal email, or responding to a personal call?"
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.

by _rsg3

2 subcomments

[deleted]

by tagyro

2 subcomments

Meta laid off around 2,000 employees this year and in April they announced a further 10% planned cut in their workforce [0].
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...
[5]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-for-the-future/

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by microflash

0 subcomment

At some point and scale, engineering (and "other" people, really) become a liability than resource. This is where the rot within surfaces through the tainted skin and there's no stopping it. It just gushes and scorches everything—people, goodwill, cultural relevance, and all.

by mikaeluman

0 subcomment

It makes sense that you need the best engineers to do the labelling. But the story very much sounds like a panic move.
"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...

by uberman

0 subcomment

Why did Meta think that VR was the end all be all before throwing away billions of dollars? Why did that want to pay an AI expert a billion dollars? The reality is Meta chases shiny objects like a cat with little real or accountable leadership.

by vladak

0 subcomment

I wonder if the booklet mentioned in the article was also inspired by the Scott McNealy booklet [1]. It would not be so surprising given the history of the Menlo Park campus.
[1] https://gist.github.com/vladak/c0abb6856d7902291f760be467b24...

by hintymad

1 subcomments

> Amazon has the Kindle
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.

by anukin

0 subcomment

This is the result of scale acquisition. Alexander Wang is a notoriously unscrupulous individual. Meta was in a bad situation post Sandberg era but Wang accelerated the process.

by csimon80

0 subcomment

In a way, it isn’t that surprising. Executives are constantly being sold the idea that "software is a solved problem." Even if they recognize that this is mostly marketing, it can still influence their internal expectations. They may start thinking, "Maybe AI has solved 30% of software development."
From there, the natural executive question becomes: "How do I make as much of my engineering organization as possible fit into that 30%?"

by MRaid

0 subcomment

I feel that most of the Procedures that they took to push AI are inherently wrong i,e full time data labelling relocation won't be appreciated by anyone why not part time ?? also Measuring token usage is weird. It is true that exectives are so hyped on AI but these procedures are shortsighted and poorely thought of

by rimeice

0 subcomment

> raises privacy questions
Meta employees being upset about being tracked is the height of irony.

by drivebyhooting

2 subcomments

Zuck has read one too many sci-fi novels. He is afraid. Afraid that he will be left behind by the AI oligopoly. Afraid that he won’t get to live in Elysium.

by a3f8c2d

0 subcomment

If the engineering culture is broken isn’t that an indication that the company is moving faster, breaking things, failing harder, etc? That’s a good thing according to Facebook’s little red book, which, according to the author is an example of good engineering culture. So I’m a little confused.

by xnx

1 subcomments

Is Meta the same story as Twitter? Two companies with way more highly paid engineers that are needed to maintain a mature social platform and ad network? Funny how both reorgs were done in about the most expensive way imaginable. Twitter through overpriced acquisition, and Facebook through technological adventurism.

by LarsDu88

2 subcomments

There's an aspect to this which feels like part of it is that Zuckerberg himself is sliding into middle age.
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.

by whatever1

0 subcomment

It’s such a waste for a company that has attracted the best talent, to just toss it.
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.

by hintymad

1 subcomments

> Managers inside Meta “fight” over the pay packets of their employees, which involves “knocking down” the packet of engineers on other teams
> 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.

by operatingthetan

1 subcomments

>“As per The Information, Meta employees used a total of 60.2 trillion AI tokens (!!) in 30 days. If this was charged at Anthropic’s API prices, it would cost $900M. Of course, Meta is likely purchasing tokens at a discount, but that could still come in at $100M+ – in large part from senseless “tokenmaxxing”.”
Holy shit, talking about perverse incentives!

by thraway3837

1 subcomments

Um. What's there to engineer at Meta? They are an ad-tech company. I thought the HN crowd would make fun of them for this. For years. But now I guess AI coding is easier to pick on than advertisements?
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?

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by dmujic

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Isn't that really common thing now, just look at Microsoft for example...

by Danox

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Meta is starting to recognize that they are hopelessly behind the other model makers, and they have been just burning cash over the last three years.

by menloshark

1 subcomments

From the inside, there's a crazy amount of attrition right now. The way they handled this layoff freaked a bunch of people out. They didn't acknowledge it for one month and every week we were wondering if it was going to happen.
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

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by aspeckt_112

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I don’t have much to add, but it’s been interesting reading the comments here. I don’t engage with many of their products. I deactivated my Facebook account in 2014, one of the few times in my life I’ve done something before it was “cool” to do so. I do reluctantly use WhatsApp, but that’s really just because literally everyone in my life does so its just easier.
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.

by otekengineering

1 subcomments

because they need to make as many employees quit as quickly as possible if they hope to avoid bankruptcy. i don't think they'll be able to avoid that outcome, instead they'll die trying. maybe their capital and network will be enough to buy them time to fully pivot to hw, though that's probably less of a moat than i believe it is while wearing the rosy glasses of an EE
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)

by dzonga

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every engineer is hands-on with 'A.I' - yet we are not seeing quality software out in the wild.
no are there bootstrapped / funded startups by Meta alumni hitting the shelve every week.

by warumdarum

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We are going to seem some fairchildren spinouts out of this mess

by sota_pop

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Could it be possible that Zuck has a Llama-shaped magic 8-ball to which he has fully committed himself to “dogfooding” an AI-only strategy to his responsibilities in the company?
“[Ll]esus take the wheel”

by kadhirvelm

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Man the dichotomy of you have autonomy to now you're a data labeler in a short span of time must be incredibly rough to deal with. How does culture recover after something like that...Anyone have thoughts when this bubble is going to pop? What a bananas time

by bevekspldnw

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”I built the Torment Nexus and I’ll got was a few million dollars and this lousy job.”

by digitaltrees

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Yes. Most companies are.

by simianwords

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This article doesn’t touch on the single most important aspect: recurring layoffs. I think he’s trying to blame AI for most of it but if we’re to guess, it would be the layoffs. Obviously if the layoffs happen so frequently, the morale goes down.
Almost every company is all in on AI so what makes Meta particularly bad?

by josefritzishere

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The AI death march is destroying so many companies. You'd think some CEOs would break away from the herd by now.

by jimmydonalds

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Honestly outside of the forced reassignment and surveillance this comes across as super whiny. Extremely unsympathetic.

by jojobas

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Never stop your enemy from making a mistake.

by frobisher

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Folks what has Meta got to do with engineering? Their products suck, we all use them because of network effects, nothing else mostly...

by start123

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they burned too much cash with Metaverse

by waterTanuki

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> Needless to say, this is invasive and raises privacy questions: If you log into your personal bank account, does the tool track you? What about when you’re writing a personal email, or responding to a personal call? Meta held no consultation and there are no workarounds; just a top-down decision being pushed through.
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?

by mac3n

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"cattle, not pets"

by mannanj

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He talks about psychosis, and I'm glad to see some people here seeing that for what it is rather than gaslighting everyone and pretending that its a made up word or that that sort of thing is a "conspiracy".
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!

by cyanydeez

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because enshittification probably has a third rail now with the belief that employees dont matter either.

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by billg_unleashed

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[dead]

by marsven_422

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[dead]

by peanut-walrus

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Turns out you don't actually need top-tier engineering talent if your only business is selling ads to scammers to prey on the elderly?

by jazzpush2

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This sounds bad to say, but it's difficult to feel bad for any meta engineers who lost their jobs.
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.

by nicechianti

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[dead]

by webdood90

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[flagged]

by wildredkraut

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Well, who cares if they do. I wouldn't miss Meta if they disappear tomorrow.

by gwbas1c

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Around 2010 I used to point out to Facebook engineers that "Facebook is the new AOL."