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.
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.
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).
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.
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 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.
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.
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. You don't really need. Some people are made this way some people evolve into that state.
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.
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.
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, add 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.
I was just reading the old speech by John Barlow, in another post[0]. Sort of dovetails with this.
I spent the majority of my career at a camera manufacturer.
I probably made half of what I could have made, anywhere else, and there were lots of issues, caused by bureaucratic overhead, heavy-handed QA, and cultural misunderstandings.
But not once, during almost 27 years, did I wonder "Are we the baddies?"[1].
My first job was at a defense contractor, where we manufactured surveillance gear, and sold it to militaries and spy agencies around the world. One of the reasons that I left that job, was because we definitely were the baddies.
I decided very early in my career that I would never work for a place that sells ads. Don't think I could sleep at night if I worked at a place like Meta or Google.
How different is it really though, if you work for a company that buys the ads?
I've thought about this because it's true for most every place I worked, we just funnel money into Google & Meta's coffers and play the SEO and social hacks game just like everyone else.
I think it's pretty different. As much as you might not want to and put effort into avoiding it, sometimes you must make a deal with the devil to live your life or operate your business, simply because the world is what it is. But working for the devil is a choice.
Right now, layoffs are cool. It boosts earnings. And the current sentiment is that new ideas and projects are risky unless they involve shoving the square-shaped-AI into the circle-shaped-hole.
The thing that bothers me the most is that the people making these decisions are "winning" regardless of the outcomes. I can't remember a time where the industry was so overtly like this (i.e., the outcomes don't really matter). Perhaps the dotcom-era but I wasn't working in tech yet.
I have a genuine question for Meta engineers: what were you hoping to gain by working at this company? What motivated you, and what were your aspirations?
I really care about VR and had the opportunity to work at Reality Labs. They paid to relocate my family to the Bay Area, where I was able to get better medical care for an autoimmune disease. I interviewed at other companies too but it was late 2022 and hiring freezes eliminated my other opportunities.
So my motivations were:
- Working on something I care about
- Getting to the Bay Area and eventually being able to move to a better/more moral company
My aspirations:
- Leave Meta ASAP for somewhere less icky
I truly, honestly believed I wouldn’t survive at the company for very long, and would be laid off. Surprisingly I got great performance reviews year after year. The stock went up substantially and it got really difficult to quit. I then had a kid, struggled to adapt to the new demands, and had no extra bandwidth to interview anywhere else. Golden handcuffs, but not in the way I expected.
My moral justification for this continues to be that Meta is such a bloated, slow, and political company that there’s almost no chance that my work has any meaningful effect whatsoever on the company’s overall success or survival.
I also donate 5-6 figures to meaningful charities, particularly the Afghanistan refugee relocation efforts. Ideally our government would just fund those efforts directly but it’s nice to be able to control a very small part of the distribution of wealth
I am interviewing at other companies now, like basically all of my coworkers
I used to work at a company that had a client that was... let's call them morally dubious, because if I start typing out what I really think of them, there'll just be a paragraph of profanity that dang will probably remove.
Anyway, since we billed hourly, I ended up keeping track of all of the money I made while working on that client's work, and donated all of it to St. Jude's hospital.
But I still feel really fucking gross about it, and I don't think that will ever go away.
Rather than donating 5-6 figures, what about saving enough cash to live on? Roughly speaking you can "make" ~$200k/year on $5M in T-bills. You could live comfortably in the US or Europe, or basically like a king anywhere else in the world. You could work on the software you want, even pro-bono, and walk away any time. I believe this is called "F U money".
People who work at Meta, the ones I met in London, didn’t seem too far removed from people working in the financial industry.
They didn’t seem to look much further than their desk and their bank accounts for what was meaningful to them. That’s ok, I’m sure we need people like that, but a lot of them were just doing the “career” thing and don’t really mind about what happens to the system they’re contributing to after they’ve done their part. They do the necessary work to keep the system in motion, without caring too deeply about what happens next. They worry about their locus of understanding and control and don’t mind much what happens after. That was my impression.
I've known many people that worked at FB/Meta, though most of them served between 2010-2020. The scale they deal with does lead to some very interesting tech challenges that can be very satisfying. Most of them eventually moved on, and my impression is that the culture really has changed post-covid.
I visited a former colleague at the Palo Alto campus in ~2014. What they were working on looked intriguing (I signed an NDA to visit and don't remember the terms, so I won't say what), but it did feel cultish at the time.
Is that because if all people in the software industry cared about the subject and technology more than the money, we would be overworked for low wages? Eg. in the video games industry?
On the flip side, is it good that people are willing to ignore the negative societal consequences of their job?
(I'm not trying to make a point, but rather asking questions since I want to know how people see this.)
It's the material reality of what people live through. When one is entirely alienated from the product of their own labour, what do they care for the mission and culture of a company who will fire me at an irrational whim? Better to have a vibrant life outside of work to keep oneself sane.
But I have enough money now and no amount of more money (that Meta could reasonably offer for my role) would make it worth staying. This place sucks now.
Are you brave, or ready to resign by posting publicly that your current employer sucks?
Either way, it’s wild watching several people in this thread literally not care if they get fired. I guess the article really is accurate.
Maybe I’m miscalibrated, but “I work at X. This place sucks” has never been a safe thing to say openly, so it’s interesting seeing it from multiple people here.
Plus there’s the usual angle of people not wanting to hire someone that’s willing to publicly trash their current employer. Will you be as vocal next job?
Don’t get me wrong, I respect that you’re outspoken. It’s just very twilight zone, so I’m trying to figure out the implications.
I mean, from the post it sounds like they already have a bank account large enough to say what they want without any repercussions having any side effects, such as unemployment.
Also, not all future employers are totally worried about that, especially when those that were doing the speaking have a very wanted set of skills. Quite often the future employer is like "Oh yea, everyone knows Meta/FB is balls, glad you pointed it out", especially in the case they are much smaller than the mega company.
> Plus there’s the usual angle of people not wanting to hire someone that’s willing to publicly trash their current employer. Will you be as vocal next job?
Someone at Meta saying it sucks publicly and that they no longer want to be there would be a positive hiring signal for many people.
Good point, that makes sense. It happens to be a special case, so they’re saying it here. But in general very few will probably be saying “this place sucks” about their employer.
I work in integrity (keeping bad stuff off the platform). My job is to reduce the harm Meta causes. So I'm at peace with myself. I don't think I could work in any other area of Meta though.
The usual bet is that you double your salary by tolerating a toxic work environment for a few years.
If you are not in the Bay Area, the absolute numbers might seem unbelievable but here you go - I have seen mid-senior engineers (4-5 years exp) get Meta offers with 700k yearly TC.
No one is getting $700k tc for senior eng outside of speciality AI roles. That’s beyond even staff level.
You can stay at the company and get stock appreciation up to that but you’re not getting a new hire offer at $700k below staff level. (Even for staff, it’s high)
Money?? Isn't that why we put up with any of this shit? The stress in this industry is intense, espically in big tech companies, and the only reason it's worth it is the extremely high salaries and stock vests.... I've been at Amazon for 4 years and if I didn't get paid like I do now there's no way I would stay.
I saw a comment by an anonymous Meta engineer who said that it's difficult to leave when you see $2m worth of unvested stock sitting in your account. How many years would you be miserable for $2m? Many people can be easily seduced by that amount of money
I guess it depends - if the miserable conditions and work I was doing only affected me, maybe a couple of years. The problem here is that Meta is a company that actively does harm to the world. They've contributed to genocide in Myanmar, harmed children, and overall have been a net negative on society. So my answer to your question, if we're strictly talking about Meta, is none. I would never work for a company like Meta because I value other humans more than money.
Money is a proxy for other things. In the places where meta has offices, the cost of living (housing, childcare, healthcare, etc etc) is so high that working for a company that pays like Meta can be the only way many can afford it all.
It's hard to expect people to sacrifice a comfortable non-extravagant lifestyle for principles.
Are there some purely money-centric lambo loving single sociopaths at companies like Meta? Sure.
However,there are probably many more employees who are not thrilled about the company's business model but dependent on the pay, while living in a system concentrates wealth and access to both capital and doesn't guarantee or make affordable the aforementioned basics of modern life.
Hopefully many of them wake up to the folly the system that makes u like Meta (or Apple, Google, etc) effectively gatekeepers of a good standard of living, but until then it's hard to question their motivation for working at these companies "for the money".
Tech company leadership gleefully replacing engineers with AI is going to be an incredibly short-lived era. I'll admit I was a little shocked at just how susceptible software engineering was to the brute force of LLMs, but man, wait until they find out just how easy it is for an LLM to do their jobs.
This isn't stopping until it gets all the way up to the asset holders.
They are not replacing anybody with AI. Meta has been a bloated hell hole for a very long time now (maybe 10+ years). Nothing, literally nothing beyond Ads and AdTech makes a dent in their earnings. The complaints here - it's not only the "recently toxic environment"; I remember a conversation I had with a Meta SWE in 2019; he said "If I stop doing anything right now, my manager would not realize for at least 6 months - the stuff I am working on is that unimportant". It's not hard to see how people will get disillusioned so quickly when the job itself is this meaningless.
This is large ymmv. Most people would get fired for not shipping stuff regularly. Just because some engineers at a big company are able to skirt by without shipping doesn’t mean that’s the norm.
The company has tens of thousands of people. There will be some variation but a lot of orgs are quite ruthless with their metrics.
Agreed - also things have changed a lot since 2019. Having said that, even people who ship and are rewarded for it do work on stuff that has very little impact on the bottom line. Except ads.
A big part of successful LLM-driven dev is caring about the quality of the output, and it's so easy to ship slop and not care in a low-morale environment.
I think execs are vastly underestimating the damage an apathetic engineering org armed with AI can do to their platform. The short-termism can (and I think will) come back around when they foster an angry culture with a huge token budget.
It reminds me of Woodstock '99, when in order to keep an angry, hungry and drunk crowd under control, the organizers planned a candlelight vigil for Columbine and gave the crowd real candles. That went over about as well as one might guess.
- harvested user data which helped a company manipulate a US election and the Brexit outcome?
- played a role in spreading hate speech, which was used to support a genocide in Myanmar?
- harmed the mental health of a generation of young people.
Just highlighting some data points. I'm really not suggesting you stand up for yourself and do something that might harm your employer that is now harming you.
Myanmar to me is damning because a) if you read Sarah Wynn's book things were reported to the company and nothing was done about it b) possibly the algorithm, you're not getting a chronological list of posts; FB favors "engagement". Though I don't know how this works in other languages
but c) because they forced this on themselves. Free Basics is Zuck's idea to own everything. They expand into markets without, I guess, checks and balances. Remember this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198
You have much less control over what the government does than choosing your job. I have rejected job offers from both facebook and google. If FAANGS want you, you have the choice of employers. And you chose.
This is why companies don't announce layoffs before they know who will be impacted, as frustrating as it can be. My morale would be in the gutter too if I had to spend a month wondering whether I'm the unlucky 1 in 10.
I don't think that matters at Meta. They purposefully create this "survival of the fittest" environment, making sure they squeeze every ounce of work (and soul) from you.
This has been building with every layoff, reorg, roadmap thrash, policy rug pull, etc since roughly 2022.
It ratchets up both after the silent layoffs, and before the announced ones; after the silent refresher reductions, and the announced MCI-like initiatives.
It's nice to think morale is only bottoming out for a month, but in actuality it is spiraling catastrophically.
That doesn't really work if you have as many frequent layoffs as Meta has had as everyone will be thinking about it constantly, along with the collapse of one of its major endeavors (Metaverse) and people realizing that the cash bonfire could have been in their pockets instead.
How will the people here who continuously rationalize AI rationalize this? A substantial number of the cheerleaders are financially invested in AI of course, but there are useful idiots, too.
You are destroying a profession that was fun and profitable. Don't come with your Luddite and "a subset of us did it to others as well" talking points.
Adding numbers wasn't fun, spreadsheets by hand weren't fun. But you are actively destroying fun thinking, perhaps because you have never worked on anything substantial yourselves and want to drag others down.
Stop enrolling in CS, let us see how that works out for FAANG in 5 years. There is no incentive any longer.
How will the people who continuously rationalize cars justify that they are destroying a profession - horse carriage driver - that was fun and profitable ?
How will the people who continuously rationalize the Internet justify that they are destroying a profession - travel agents - that was fun and profitable?
If we blocked every possible innovation because it lowered the fun of something existing we'd never have progressed past the Stone Age.
Professionally driving a horse carriage wasn't fun. Noise, boredom, unloading things manually if it was a carriage for goods. It was probably a moderately horrible job.
Travel agents used to give better recommendations and even cheaper flights. There is little innovation in the ad laden travel sites that give bad deals. Case in point: Often if you call a hotel directly you get a better price than on the sites and they don't give you the room next to the elevator that appears to be reserved for people who order via the sites.
Real anti-stone-age innovation has mostly been in the physical world to free up time for thinking. That is what the rich people who cannot think for themselves now want to take away.
There are a lot of valid reasons to hate AI, but I don't think "morale of Meta engineers" is a very good one. What were they building? Maybe it was fun--some fun tech seems to have come out of Meta--but what was its social impact? On teenage mental health? On politics and the electorate in the US? On the Rohingya? And they meanwhile they were compensated very well for years.
I don't know that this has a ton to do with AI. Meta has had "fuck around" money for a very long time, the kind of money that let Zuckerberg hire a ton of people to make the Metaverse. And it let a lot of engineers work on things they were passionate about but that don't directly drive profits.
As Meta's stock price falls that fuck around money falls away and people's jobs are suddenly a lot more focused on making the company cash. Of course that's going to make people miserable.
It's a story, but I don't really agree with this explanation. Fucking around burning money on VR didn't help morale in the other 90% of the company. And in general employees (all with RSUs) were happy about the stock price appreciation that came from a renewed fiscal discipline post 2022 or so.
They'll use the same tired and morally bankrupt excuse as everyone else that builds horrible things: "If we don't do it, someone else will. (Also we'll make so much money doing it!)"
Record low morale for working for one of the worst companies in existence? How can one be smart enough to work for Meta, but not see this coming? I wish I had some sympathy for Meta employees, but I truly do not. You reap what you sow.
Things have changed and I think most employees in SV/big tech have not yet come to the realization that the executives really, genuinely, honestly, actively despise their employees and gleefully want to see them suffer. It doesn't matter if it's bad for the company's long-term health, or bad for customers, or or bad for finances or PR or anything else, it is now pathological/idealogical now.
They do have a small circle of trusted people who they like (like the 1%, lol), but if you're not in, you're just trash that they haven't gotten around to cleaning out yet.
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.
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.
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).
Definitely happens. Many meetings about what to do with the avalanche of vibe diffs from PMs that take organic SWE eyeball time to review hah
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.
Are they going to unionise?
Okay. Dumping my $META stock
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 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.
This is the guy who tried to make the metaverse a thing. He has been out of touch for decades now.
He's also the guy who bought Instagram for $1bn and turned into a $70bn behemoth. If that's out of touch then I don't know what the opposite would be.
Exactly. The yes man culture must be pretty hard near him.
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.
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. You don't really need. Some people are made this way some people evolve into that state.
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.
"Dumb fucks"
Arguably hacking Crimson reporters when they tried investigating him for activities at Harvard
Buying Whatsapp so he can have a monopoly
Copying Snapchat multiple times
I mean, I can go on
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.
I think he is playing the political game and will be pro who ever is in office to protect his baby
Meta is a scourge of a company.
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, add 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.
A dumb thing Zuck said when he was in college pales in comparison to the horrible stuff he's enabled as a fully formed adult who should know better.
Yes.
But there are things you say as a young person that are revealing of core personality traits.
Most people would just not say that.
I guess it's a sign of the times.
I was just reading the old speech by John Barlow, in another post[0]. Sort of dovetails with this.
I spent the majority of my career at a camera manufacturer.
I probably made half of what I could have made, anywhere else, and there were lots of issues, caused by bureaucratic overhead, heavy-handed QA, and cultural misunderstandings.
But not once, during almost 27 years, did I wonder "Are we the baddies?"[1].
My first job was at a defense contractor, where we manufactured surveillance gear, and sold it to militaries and spy agencies around the world. One of the reasons that I left that job, was because we definitely were the baddies.
[0] https://www.eff.org/pages/leaving-physical-world
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY
I decided very early in my career that I would never work for a place that sells ads. Don't think I could sleep at night if I worked at a place like Meta or Google.
How different is it really though, if you work for a company that buys the ads?
I've thought about this because it's true for most every place I worked, we just funnel money into Google & Meta's coffers and play the SEO and social hacks game just like everyone else.
I think it's pretty different. As much as you might not want to and put effort into avoiding it, sometimes you must make a deal with the devil to live your life or operate your business, simply because the world is what it is. But working for the devil is a choice.
>I probably made half of what I could have made, anywhere else...
Peace of mind over peace of wallet for me, every time.
The pendulum swings.
Right now, layoffs are cool. It boosts earnings. And the current sentiment is that new ideas and projects are risky unless they involve shoving the square-shaped-AI into the circle-shaped-hole.
The thing that bothers me the most is that the people making these decisions are "winning" regardless of the outcomes. I can't remember a time where the industry was so overtly like this (i.e., the outcomes don't really matter). Perhaps the dotcom-era but I wasn't working in tech yet.
I have a genuine question for Meta engineers: what were you hoping to gain by working at this company? What motivated you, and what were your aspirations?
I work at Meta (for now…)
I really care about VR and had the opportunity to work at Reality Labs. They paid to relocate my family to the Bay Area, where I was able to get better medical care for an autoimmune disease. I interviewed at other companies too but it was late 2022 and hiring freezes eliminated my other opportunities.
So my motivations were: - Working on something I care about - Getting to the Bay Area and eventually being able to move to a better/more moral company
My aspirations: - Leave Meta ASAP for somewhere less icky
I truly, honestly believed I wouldn’t survive at the company for very long, and would be laid off. Surprisingly I got great performance reviews year after year. The stock went up substantially and it got really difficult to quit. I then had a kid, struggled to adapt to the new demands, and had no extra bandwidth to interview anywhere else. Golden handcuffs, but not in the way I expected.
My moral justification for this continues to be that Meta is such a bloated, slow, and political company that there’s almost no chance that my work has any meaningful effect whatsoever on the company’s overall success or survival.
I also donate 5-6 figures to meaningful charities, particularly the Afghanistan refugee relocation efforts. Ideally our government would just fund those efforts directly but it’s nice to be able to control a very small part of the distribution of wealth
I am interviewing at other companies now, like basically all of my coworkers
I used to work at a company that had a client that was... let's call them morally dubious, because if I start typing out what I really think of them, there'll just be a paragraph of profanity that dang will probably remove.
Anyway, since we billed hourly, I ended up keeping track of all of the money I made while working on that client's work, and donated all of it to St. Jude's hospital.
But I still feel really fucking gross about it, and I don't think that will ever go away.
Rather than donating 5-6 figures, what about saving enough cash to live on? Roughly speaking you can "make" ~$200k/year on $5M in T-bills. You could live comfortably in the US or Europe, or basically like a king anywhere else in the world. You could work on the software you want, even pro-bono, and walk away any time. I believe this is called "F U money".
People who work at Meta, the ones I met in London, didn’t seem too far removed from people working in the financial industry.
They didn’t seem to look much further than their desk and their bank accounts for what was meaningful to them. That’s ok, I’m sure we need people like that, but a lot of them were just doing the “career” thing and don’t really mind about what happens to the system they’re contributing to after they’ve done their part. They do the necessary work to keep the system in motion, without caring too deeply about what happens next. They worry about their locus of understanding and control and don’t mind much what happens after. That was my impression.
I've known many people that worked at FB/Meta, though most of them served between 2010-2020. The scale they deal with does lead to some very interesting tech challenges that can be very satisfying. Most of them eventually moved on, and my impression is that the culture really has changed post-covid.
I visited a former colleague at the Palo Alto campus in ~2014. What they were working on looked intriguing (I signed an NDA to visit and don't remember the terms, so I won't say what), but it did feel cultish at the time.
> I’m sure we need people like that
Is that because if all people in the software industry cared about the subject and technology more than the money, we would be overworked for low wages? Eg. in the video games industry?
On the flip side, is it good that people are willing to ignore the negative societal consequences of their job?
(I'm not trying to make a point, but rather asking questions since I want to know how people see this.)
"Desk and bank account" makes for a very small world. Have we shrunk? Are we dwarfs now?
It's the material reality of what people live through. When one is entirely alienated from the product of their own labour, what do they care for the mission and culture of a company who will fire me at an irrational whim? Better to have a vibrant life outside of work to keep oneself sane.
I work at Meta.
1) Work with top minds in ML 2) Money
But I have enough money now and no amount of more money (that Meta could reasonably offer for my role) would make it worth staying. This place sucks now.
Are you brave, or ready to resign by posting publicly that your current employer sucks?
Either way, it’s wild watching several people in this thread literally not care if they get fired. I guess the article really is accurate.
Maybe I’m miscalibrated, but “I work at X. This place sucks” has never been a safe thing to say openly, so it’s interesting seeing it from multiple people here.
Plus there’s the usual angle of people not wanting to hire someone that’s willing to publicly trash their current employer. Will you be as vocal next job?
Don’t get me wrong, I respect that you’re outspoken. It’s just very twilight zone, so I’m trying to figure out the implications.
I mean, from the post it sounds like they already have a bank account large enough to say what they want without any repercussions having any side effects, such as unemployment.
Also, not all future employers are totally worried about that, especially when those that were doing the speaking have a very wanted set of skills. Quite often the future employer is like "Oh yea, everyone knows Meta/FB is balls, glad you pointed it out", especially in the case they are much smaller than the mega company.
> Plus there’s the usual angle of people not wanting to hire someone that’s willing to publicly trash their current employer. Will you be as vocal next job?
Someone at Meta saying it sucks publicly and that they no longer want to be there would be a positive hiring signal for many people.
Good point, that makes sense. It happens to be a special case, so they’re saying it here. But in general very few will probably be saying “this place sucks” about their employer.
Why do you stay?
Do you think both are worth the harms your company is causing to the rest of the world?
I work in integrity (keeping bad stuff off the platform). My job is to reduce the harm Meta causes. So I'm at peace with myself. I don't think I could work in any other area of Meta though.
Actions speak. Of course they do.
The usual bet is that you double your salary by tolerating a toxic work environment for a few years.
If you are not in the Bay Area, the absolute numbers might seem unbelievable but here you go - I have seen mid-senior engineers (4-5 years exp) get Meta offers with 700k yearly TC.
No one is getting $700k tc for senior eng outside of speciality AI roles. That’s beyond even staff level.
You can stay at the company and get stock appreciation up to that but you’re not getting a new hire offer at $700k below staff level. (Even for staff, it’s high)
Not a Meta engineer, but I've known a couple. It's money.
The same for any FAANG, money.
alot of them make 1M+
Money?? Isn't that why we put up with any of this shit? The stress in this industry is intense, espically in big tech companies, and the only reason it's worth it is the extremely high salaries and stock vests.... I've been at Amazon for 4 years and if I didn't get paid like I do now there's no way I would stay.
I'm not a Meta engineer, but if I had to offer a guess, the answer would be money.
I saw a comment by an anonymous Meta engineer who said that it's difficult to leave when you see $2m worth of unvested stock sitting in your account. How many years would you be miserable for $2m? Many people can be easily seduced by that amount of money
Totally understandable, and probably another reason why morale is so low, as employees watch the stock price and their personal fortunes fall.
I guess it depends - if the miserable conditions and work I was doing only affected me, maybe a couple of years. The problem here is that Meta is a company that actively does harm to the world. They've contributed to genocide in Myanmar, harmed children, and overall have been a net negative on society. So my answer to your question, if we're strictly talking about Meta, is none. I would never work for a company like Meta because I value other humans more than money.
Having a passion for personal financial solvency is a major motivation for a surprising number of people.
Money is a proxy for other things. In the places where meta has offices, the cost of living (housing, childcare, healthcare, etc etc) is so high that working for a company that pays like Meta can be the only way many can afford it all.
It's hard to expect people to sacrifice a comfortable non-extravagant lifestyle for principles.
Are there some purely money-centric lambo loving single sociopaths at companies like Meta? Sure.
However,there are probably many more employees who are not thrilled about the company's business model but dependent on the pay, while living in a system concentrates wealth and access to both capital and doesn't guarantee or make affordable the aforementioned basics of modern life.
Hopefully many of them wake up to the folly the system that makes u like Meta (or Apple, Google, etc) effectively gatekeepers of a good standard of living, but until then it's hard to question their motivation for working at these companies "for the money".
https://archive.ph/BfugB
Tech company leadership gleefully replacing engineers with AI is going to be an incredibly short-lived era. I'll admit I was a little shocked at just how susceptible software engineering was to the brute force of LLMs, but man, wait until they find out just how easy it is for an LLM to do their jobs.
This isn't stopping until it gets all the way up to the asset holders.
They are not replacing anybody with AI. Meta has been a bloated hell hole for a very long time now (maybe 10+ years). Nothing, literally nothing beyond Ads and AdTech makes a dent in their earnings. The complaints here - it's not only the "recently toxic environment"; I remember a conversation I had with a Meta SWE in 2019; he said "If I stop doing anything right now, my manager would not realize for at least 6 months - the stuff I am working on is that unimportant". It's not hard to see how people will get disillusioned so quickly when the job itself is this meaningless.
This is large ymmv. Most people would get fired for not shipping stuff regularly. Just because some engineers at a big company are able to skirt by without shipping doesn’t mean that’s the norm.
The company has tens of thousands of people. There will be some variation but a lot of orgs are quite ruthless with their metrics.
Agreed - also things have changed a lot since 2019. Having said that, even people who ship and are rewarded for it do work on stuff that has very little impact on the bottom line. Except ads.
A big part of successful LLM-driven dev is caring about the quality of the output, and it's so easy to ship slop and not care in a low-morale environment.
I think execs are vastly underestimating the damage an apathetic engineering org armed with AI can do to their platform. The short-termism can (and I think will) come back around when they foster an angry culture with a huge token budget.
It reminds me of Woodstock '99, when in order to keep an angry, hungry and drunk crowd under control, the organizers planned a candlelight vigil for Columbine and gave the crowd real candles. That went over about as well as one might guess.
I am wondering if Zuckerberg somehow stumbled upon the old Decimation thing on Wikipedia one late evening and decided it was a good idea to try.
I don't really understand the rationale otherwise, hiring is hard, and they are not forced to reduce cost now.
This seems like a colossal mistake. Not the first of course.
> stumbled upon the old Decimation thing on Wikipedia
He took Latin at his first high school and at Exeter when he went there for 11th and 12th grades, so he almost certainly knew it without Wikipedia.
But yeah, whenever I've survived a layoff it feels a bit like surviving a decimation or some other collective punishment.
what is the Decimation thing?
It is something that occured a few times in Roman history.
A collective punishment, 10% of the soldiers killed by their peers, randomly choosen.
Roman legions would execute every 10th man as collective punishment. Kept the survivors in line. No idea if it ever actually happened.
Related:
Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48077126
Hey Meta folks, remember that time when Facebook:
- harvested user data which helped a company manipulate a US election and the Brexit outcome?
- played a role in spreading hate speech, which was used to support a genocide in Myanmar?
- harmed the mental health of a generation of young people.
Just highlighting some data points. I'm really not suggesting you stand up for yourself and do something that might harm your employer that is now harming you.
Myanmar to me is damning because a) if you read Sarah Wynn's book things were reported to the company and nothing was done about it b) possibly the algorithm, you're not getting a chronological list of posts; FB favors "engagement". Though I don't know how this works in other languages
but c) because they forced this on themselves. Free Basics is Zuck's idea to own everything. They expand into markets without, I guess, checks and balances. Remember this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198
Wonder when Americans will apply this to themselves with their own government which does far worse things everyday instead of posting these comments.
You have much less control over what the government does than choosing your job. I have rejected job offers from both facebook and google. If FAANGS want you, you have the choice of employers. And you chose.
This is why companies don't announce layoffs before they know who will be impacted, as frustrating as it can be. My morale would be in the gutter too if I had to spend a month wondering whether I'm the unlucky 1 in 10.
I don't think that matters at Meta. They purposefully create this "survival of the fittest" environment, making sure they squeeze every ounce of work (and soul) from you.
This has been building with every layoff, reorg, roadmap thrash, policy rug pull, etc since roughly 2022.
It ratchets up both after the silent layoffs, and before the announced ones; after the silent refresher reductions, and the announced MCI-like initiatives.
It's nice to think morale is only bottoming out for a month, but in actuality it is spiraling catastrophically.
That doesn't really work if you have as many frequent layoffs as Meta has had as everyone will be thinking about it constantly, along with the collapse of one of its major endeavors (Metaverse) and people realizing that the cash bonfire could have been in their pockets instead.
They don't care. Only 5% of their people contribute to the bottom line. Rest are all deadweight.
How will the people here who continuously rationalize AI rationalize this? A substantial number of the cheerleaders are financially invested in AI of course, but there are useful idiots, too.
You are destroying a profession that was fun and profitable. Don't come with your Luddite and "a subset of us did it to others as well" talking points.
Adding numbers wasn't fun, spreadsheets by hand weren't fun. But you are actively destroying fun thinking, perhaps because you have never worked on anything substantial yourselves and want to drag others down.
Stop enrolling in CS, let us see how that works out for FAANG in 5 years. There is no incentive any longer.
How will the people who continuously rationalize cars justify that they are destroying a profession - horse carriage driver - that was fun and profitable ?
How will the people who continuously rationalize the Internet justify that they are destroying a profession - travel agents - that was fun and profitable?
If we blocked every possible innovation because it lowered the fun of something existing we'd never have progressed past the Stone Age.
Professionally driving a horse carriage wasn't fun. Noise, boredom, unloading things manually if it was a carriage for goods. It was probably a moderately horrible job.
Travel agents used to give better recommendations and even cheaper flights. There is little innovation in the ad laden travel sites that give bad deals. Case in point: Often if you call a hotel directly you get a better price than on the sites and they don't give you the room next to the elevator that appears to be reserved for people who order via the sites.
Real anti-stone-age innovation has mostly been in the physical world to free up time for thinking. That is what the rich people who cannot think for themselves now want to take away.
There are a lot of valid reasons to hate AI, but I don't think "morale of Meta engineers" is a very good one. What were they building? Maybe it was fun--some fun tech seems to have come out of Meta--but what was its social impact? On teenage mental health? On politics and the electorate in the US? On the Rohingya? And they meanwhile they were compensated very well for years.
I don't know that this has a ton to do with AI. Meta has had "fuck around" money for a very long time, the kind of money that let Zuckerberg hire a ton of people to make the Metaverse. And it let a lot of engineers work on things they were passionate about but that don't directly drive profits.
As Meta's stock price falls that fuck around money falls away and people's jobs are suddenly a lot more focused on making the company cash. Of course that's going to make people miserable.
It's a story, but I don't really agree with this explanation. Fucking around burning money on VR didn't help morale in the other 90% of the company. And in general employees (all with RSUs) were happy about the stock price appreciation that came from a renewed fiscal discipline post 2022 or so.
They'll use the same tired and morally bankrupt excuse as everyone else that builds horrible things: "If we don't do it, someone else will. (Also we'll make so much money doing it!)"
AI probably can be useful but not used like this
Of course Zuckerberg has no idea what he's doing
Record low morale for working for one of the worst companies in existence? How can one be smart enough to work for Meta, but not see this coming? I wish I had some sympathy for Meta employees, but I truly do not. You reap what you sow.
Yeah culture has gone too shit. Since Sheryl left
Things have changed and I think most employees in SV/big tech have not yet come to the realization that the executives really, genuinely, honestly, actively despise their employees and gleefully want to see them suffer. It doesn't matter if it's bad for the company's long-term health, or bad for customers, or or bad for finances or PR or anything else, it is now pathological/idealogical now.
They do have a small circle of trusted people who they like (like the 1%, lol), but if you're not in, you're just trash that they haven't gotten around to cleaning out yet.
Meta is a normal high-comp company (for now) now. This is what it’s like to work at any mature F500 outside of privileged organizations and teams.
Extremely untrue. Meta is significantly worse than your average F500.
How so and in regard to which part of my claim?