alt Hacker NewsIs Meta destroying its engineering organization?
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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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We are going to seem some fairchildren spinouts out of this mess
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.
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.
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...
Around 2010 I used to point out to Facebook engineers that "Facebook is the new AOL."
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.
"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.
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...
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.
"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?)
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.
Anyone at Meta able to confirm or expand on the details in this?
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.
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.)
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.
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%?"
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> raises privacy questions
Meta employees being upset about being tracked is the height of irony.
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)
Honestly outside of the forced reassignment and surveillance this comes across as super whiny. Extremely unsympathetic.
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?
The AI death march is destroying so many companies. You'd think some CEOs would break away from the herd by now.
they burned too much cash with Metaverse
>“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!
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
”I built the Torment Nexus and I’ll got was a few million dollars and this lousy job.”
because enshittification probably has a third rail now with the belief that employees dont matter either.
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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?
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.
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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.