Mass layoffs and absentee bosses create a morale crisis at Meta

The Metaverse was always such a bad direction. At the time, I was really unsure about my intuition -- I figured that if Mark Zuckerberg decided it&#x27;s worth pivoting his entire company towards that goal, he surely must have <i>some data</i> to back that up. As it stands, my intuition (and everybody else&#x27;s) turned out to be right.<p>It&#x27;s been the same with crypto, for that matter. None of the reasonable people I know ever saw any grand value in crypto. Researching myself, it always just seemed to be a bullshit fractal. At the height of the crypto boom, I was beginning to doubt my conclusions and started to think that perhaps the societal nature of crypto is a force in itself. Like religion, if enough people believe in it, it becomes reality to some extent. But now we see that crypto was indeed bullshit all along.<p>Contrast that with the generative AI models revolution. It&#x27;s clear to anyone from day one how useful those models will be, and that they are providing clear value right away. It&#x27;s no wonder that all the companies are immediately pivoting towards it. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg was just unlucky to decide on a company pivot two years too early -- I&#x27;m sure that if he had to decide on a direction to pivot to today, it&#x27;d be towards generative AI.

The mixed messaging is pretty stunning. Pushing the metaverse, but simultaneously pushing &quot;be at the office&quot;. Then seniors leaders spending more time on LLM projects than on the metaverse concept. All from their new remote homes rather than the office.

In a comment I made about 18 months ago, I noted that Facebook&#x27;s insufficient investment in anything useful would hold them back. The true cost of the Metaverse isn&#x27;t solely the capital needed for development; it&#x27;s also the opportunity cost that will become apparent in the future. What aren&#x27;t they doing that they could be?<p>There is also another aspect to consider. The swift expansion of generative AI is driving the transition from a Social Graph to a Content Graph. Online users are now more interested in engaging, up-to-date content rather than keeping up with their friends&#x27; activities. Platforms like TikTok and YouTube pioneered this trend, while Twitter&#x27;s timeline modifications serve as a functional yet imperfect example. Content discovery now takes precedence over static friend lists.<p>The core principle that Facebook was built on is gradually crumbling. This isn&#x27;t just about Apple&#x27;s privacy policies or regulatory constraints; it&#x27;s a fundamental shift in user behavior. The primary reason people visit Facebook—connecting with people they know—is now at odds with their main online activity: consuming content from strangers. Facebook has become a platform for discovering uncomfortable opinions of acquaintances and realizing the irrelevance of past social connections.<p>Facebook is attempting to adapt, but their efforts only diminish the platform&#x27;s value for average users. Instagram&#x27;s discovery page and Reels are examples, but the latter pales in comparison to TikTok. Facebook&#x27;s endeavors in short-form video are likely a futile game of catch-up, a classic innovator&#x27;s dilemma.<p>The Metaverse&#x27;s introduction seemed like a desperate, last-minute attempt from the C-suite to save face. Anyone who has worked at a high-profile tech company has likely seen this tactic before: weak financial quarters lead to premature product announcements. The all-encompassing nature of the Metaverse announcement signals that something is amiss. It&#x27;s only more futile now.

This is a poorly reported article.<p>1) The author seems to think 2 rounds of layoffs have already been executed and now a third is coming, when actually the 2nd round of layoffs is still being executed. 2) The author mentions twice that the coming round of layoffs will affect engineering for the first time; this is not true -- thousands of eng were laid off in the first round. 3) The author mentions that the stock price has dropped 43% from its peak as evidence that Meta faces a precarious future. No mention that META has been one of the hottest tech stocks in 23Q1, gaining more than 75%.<p>I&#x27;m no Meta apologist, and this is really a &quot;dog bites man&quot; story anyway (&quot;layoffs announced; morale bad&quot;) but I don&#x27;t really trust this author&#x27;s general reporting competence.

The problem I have with articles like this is, well, sample size. They talked to 9 former <i>and</i> current employees, out of 60,000 employees. I&#x27;m no fan of Meta, but is it really fair to say there is a &quot;crisis&quot; of morale at a company with such a tiny sample size?

People look at Meta with these bizarro rose-colored glasses, as if it was once a company with some nobel mission that lost its way.<p>Facebook, from the very beginning, knew what it was doing once they found the &quot;secret&quot;. They found, by accident, the ability tap into people&#x27;s insecurities and exploit that to extract data and then serve ads that further insecurities. They found an emotional loop that printed dollars. People gave up an entire lifetime of information for free so they could feel connected.<p>The Metaverse is just trying to get lightning to strike twice. It will probably get there. As people become more isolated they will become more insecure and place an even higher value on social interaction.<p>VR sucks. Flat screens and fixed focal point lenses result in a huge out of focus area—you move your eyes within the headset and you can&#x27;t focus—which feels unnatural. Eventually we will solve this, and once we do it will go mainstream. If you can look past the crappy optics and you log into VRChat today it feels… good. It feels like you are actually interacting with people. It simply feels good. Most people just can&#x27;t look past the poor optics. You put a $2000 headset on the average person and their response is always, &quot;Cool, but it&#x27;s kinda heavy. Also, why is it so blurry?&quot; Someone will solve this, eventually.<p>Meta is banking on exactly what made Facebook. They will create a space that makes you feel good, and then get you to give up even more information and see even more ads designed explicitly to manipulate you because the advertiser knows so much about you. Honestly, it&#x27;s a brilliant idea to try and do the same thing again but harder. Possible it&#x27;s too early, but if you have billions to blow why not. Right now it&#x27;s a product that only caters to the most socially isolated individuals. That will change.<p>Why did my parents join Facebook? They did it because they were lonely. It&#x27;s why the Facebook audience is now so old. It took them a while to come up with a UI that was easy enough for old people to use it, but they did. They are trying to do the same with VR. There&#x27;s a pretty good chance of success in my opinion.

&gt; the cuts expected this month will be the first to affect tech departments, including engineers, which has surprised employees<p>Huh? The earlier layoffs definitely affected tech. I know of a bunch of former colleagues in engineering roles that were laid off in the first round. Sure, recruiting was affected more, which makes sense when hiring was reduced to almost zero, but this is very much not the first time engineers will be included in layoffs.

&gt; Within Meta, there is pressure to demonstrate that people are working hard, two employees said. Intense scrutiny has come in recent workplace reviews, which the management consultancy firm Bain and Company is assisting. Workers, especially in middle management, are being asked to justify why their jobs are crucial to Meta’s goals.<p>I thought scenes like this would only happen in movies like The Office. Never did I expect something like that to happen in real life.<p>Corporate america is so dumb.

<i>&gt; Mr. Zuckerberg has made a big bet on the metaverse, an immersive online world.</i><p>This is one of those &quot;Were there any adults in the room when the decision was discussed?&quot; instances that I see all over the place, these days.<p>Like 3D televisions, immersive 3D avatar worlds have been tried -more than once.<p>They work great for games, but not for real-life stuff. There are a few &quot;corner cases,&quot; where it&#x27;s being supported (I think there.com is still a thing), but otherwise, it only exists in the minds of SF writers.

&gt; And for the first time, some of those cuts could be in engineering groups, which would have been unthinkable before the trouble started last year, two employees said.<p>What? The November 2022 layoffs were already 50:50 engineering:biz. The communication around the April layoffs has been that they will cut less in engineering groups (or at least, software engineering roles).

For close to a decade now, people have been insisting that Facebook is in trouble because young folks don&#x27;t like it. I&#x27;ve always rejected that idea because usage kept growing regardless, young users or not.<p>Something&#x27;s different now though, something is in the air. I genuinely believe we&#x27;ve achieved peak social media already, and it&#x27;s downhill from here.<p>Usage is close to maximized. The amount of distractions one can tolerate in the form of ads has breached tolerance levels.<p>There&#x27;s the repetitiveness. Social media is now &gt; 15 years old. Reading content on a daily basis even if you find said content mildly enjoyable is getting very &quot;meh&quot;.<p>Influencers, activists, scammers, spammers have developed a wide array of tactics that piggy-back on outrage algorithms that make feeds upsetting instead of pleasant.<p>I think an increasing amount of people are realizing that social media sucks. You can do without it or do with less of it, and this only improves your life. I don&#x27;t expect a super steep decline, rather a lengthy slow one. For sure not any meaningful growth, other than the occasional sideways switch.<p>That definitely feels like an existential problem for Facebook.

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VR has a time lag issue which I personally think is unfixable. I do not believe we have systems which can react in real-time without something morally akin to an uncanny valley glitch, somewhere in the processing loop.<p>Make it 120hz. make it HD. make it as good as you like, I am really sure that for the forseeable future computing ALL the asynchronous real-world event changes and arranging for them to arrive at the right time, compared to your own movements is functionally impossible.<p>A later thread speaks to the specific torture test: simulate being in a stadium for all 100,000 people and show ME the one person who is waving a giant hand I want to look at, out of 1000, against the game play on the field. You&#x27;ve now got to martial 100,000 events, render them into my view, and focus on a random singleton in real-time against game play, no matter how I move my head. Simulataneously, for everyone, with other async events taking place beside me, or in another sense-space.<p>Either you glitch the VR experience, or you put me on delay.<p>Zuckerberg swung the company to deliver an experience which was never going to score 8 out of 10 for average user experience. It was always heading to 3 out of 10. He should have put it into a sub-division and spent his personal risk money on it, not bet the company.

It seems to me like it&#x27;d be extraordinarily difficult at a company whose product is supposed to &quot;connect people&quot; and bring people together, while even from the outside it&#x27;s transparently built to extract the most data and dollars it possibly can from its users, often at their great expense (see teen suicide numbers and depression being linked to social media usage). While internally, they don&#x27;t even pretend to care.<p>For a while this was probably easy for &quot;metamates&quot; to ignore due to the astoundingly inflated salaries compared to the rest of the non-FAANG tech sector, but when you start wantonly laying off massive chunks of the company based on poor decisions you made pursuing this &quot;goal,&quot; I mean, it would seem to be that nearly anyone with a soul would be feeling demoralized by now.

Facebook has been building out one of the most powerful GPU clusters on the planet [1] for AI research, since at least 2021. This blog post in Jan of 2022 says they were already doing NLP research on it &quot;with the aim of one day training models with trillions of parameters.&quot;. Their 2017 cluster, had 22,000 NVIDIA V100s.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ai.facebook.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;ai-rsc&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ai.facebook.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;ai-rsc&#x2F;</a>

Meta is a great example of why you need a really good vision and execution.<p>Imagine an alternative world where instead of acquiring Oculus and later pivoting to the metaverse, Zuckerboard went all in on AI (LLM weren&#x27;t a thing quite yet then), and instead rebranded the company Fabula (tale in latin), and developed AI technology to accelerate their original mission of connecting people. Though it’s true Facebook has an amazing AI team, it’s my understanding none of it has really been turned into product. In that regard they have been more like Google and less like OpenAI<p>They likely would&#x27;ve created something similar to LLMs by themselves in short order, but in the worst case could have made their own LLM after the Google paper.<p>You could imagine all sort of neat affordances given by an AI:<p>- Friendship level suggestions on what to do<p>- Meetup work, suggested on similar likes<p>- Improved suggestions<p>etc<p>I bet that hypothetical pivot would&#x27;ve been better than the metaverse. At this point (2023) you might imagine things iterating to the point where users have some sort of assist that helps facilitate engagement with your facebook friends (with ads, of course, hah).

Ok so I actually work at Meta and I hope they do more layoffs. There are so many redundant teams and useless features being pushed. After the last layoff my job got so much easier because I wasn&#x27;t constantly fighting people trying to ship dumb features that pollute the codebase.<p>And even if I get laid off there&#x27;s a fat severance package waiting for me. It&#x27;s a win-win.

Workers at Facebook 10 years ago: I’m glad my company isn’t like Microsoft.<p>Workers now: I wish my company was like Microsoft.

&gt;&gt;&gt; &quot;“They’re saying it’s ‘Hunger Games’ meets ‘Lord of the Flies,’ where everyone is trying to prove their worth to management.”<p>It sounds like people are really insecure about themselves financially or egoistically. You don&#x27;t want to put yourself in a position where you have to have your job or you can&#x27;t go without one for a few a years. and if you&#x27;re ego can&#x27;t handle being laid off or fired, you may want to do something about that because jobs these days don&#x27;t last much longer than 2-4 years at most places: just look at people&#x27;s resumes on linkedIn.

I think people are missing the point when they call Metaverse a &#x27;misstep&#x27; because it implies Zuckerberg was a good actor who just happened to get this one thing wrong... if you look through his history of things like forced Whatsapp sharing (plus Onavo), Free Basics, all of the shitty things the company does... the Metaverse was never a good faith effort and people need to understand that; newsflash, he&#x27;s not a shining example of what a good person is<p>(And the whole stealing Facebook from other people in the first place, anyway)

The morale crisis should have come when they understood that their work directly and negatively impacts on our younger generation’s mental health.

It&#x27;s only been a few years.<p>Genentech dumped money into a hole for 20 years before having a viable product.

Meta has always had a morale crisis, recently exacerbated by Cambridge Analytica and the like. People wanted to work there because of the money. Flat-out.<p>Once the pay is equivalent to the rest of the industry and the extravagant perks are gone, wouldn&#x27;t you prefer to work somewhere at least moderately less evil? I certainly would.

As others have already pointed out, going &quot;ultra pro max&quot; on the metaverse was such a huge miscalculation by Zuck. I was so torn when Mark was pushing this idea like it was main thing now. The whole rebrand was flawed. Like you could just ask people all around you if they were going to use this meta crap and no one said yes (basic product&#x2F;market fit)<p>What really confirmed this awful strategy for me was when Sheryl (ex-COO FB) left the company. You have to understand, FBs leadership was beautifully segregated. The business side was handled by Sheryl (and team) while Zuck and Boz took care of product and technology.<p>At its heart FaceBook was a good product (and viable business model), a few tweaks and changes would have made it sooo much better.<p>Even though I deleted my account for personal reasons in 2017, FB fueled the post 2005 hacker culture and it is sad to see this state of the company that inspired so many of us.

The comments in this thread baffles me, because I thought the Metaverse was doomed from the start, and I think the disconnect is many people believe in the &quot;great man theory.&quot;<p>Mark Zuckerberg didn&#x27;t create social media: he rode the social media wave. He was the best-positioned competitor, which counts for a lot, but the other conditions had to be there first.<p>Some seem to think he willed social media into existence -- including himself -- which suggests he&#x27;d be able to will the Metaverse into existence too.<p>But no amount of investment or strategy will make a large fraction of the population want something.

I honestly don’t understand why VR hasn’t caught on. Every time I let someone try my Quest for the first time their minds are blown. It’s very cool technology and seems like the next logical step for video games.

The article does not state it. But I wonder - do these layoffs are from Metaverse project? If so, what would those people expect? Did they really believe in the project when they applied and worked on it?

a lot of big techs doing layoffs. you will find a lot of ex-employees got something to say about their former employer.

I still can&#x27;t believe the Metaverse is the core strategy of a major global corporation. I&#x27;ve been deep in technology my entire life and I honestly couldn&#x27;t even tell you <i>what</i> the Metaverse is. I can talk all day long about AI or crypto or online gaming or how to build web apps but gun to my head, I could not give even a rough definition of what the metaverse is or is supposed to be.

Mass layoffs have hard-to-measure second- and third- order effects? Wall St. wouldn&#x27;t reward something that was bad for a company in the long run!

You don’t find out who is great at business when everything is up and to the right, you find out when the market is rough. The current market is already doing a good job of shaking out companies and executives that really weren’t very good but that was being masked by a market where you had to try hard not to succeed.

Everyone seems to be reacting to this as if it&#x27;s being done out of necessity due to financial pressures. I see it much more as Zuckerberg on a mission. Facebook is doing OK as far as we know. Neither the metaverse failing (too early for its financial impact to be a factor) nor Facebook&#x27;s performance at surface level are driving this. It seems to me more like Zuckerberg is taking back the company after the Sandberg years and molding it in his own image again - sharp and scrappy and focused. Will be very interesting to see if he can pull it off, or if as everyone is anticipating, it&#x27;s just going to crater morale to the point where nobody good is left there.

I wonder if the visible white patch around Zuckerberg&#x27;s eyes in the main photo are genuinely because he&#x27;s been wearing a VR headset for 12 hours a day testing the metaverse or if they added it in Photoshop to make it look like he had.

the faster Meta crumbles into oblivion the better. Zuckface and Twitbook and Crapchat and all the other &quot;social&quot; media platforms are literally just data-harvesting programs that are, like the fashion industry, just trying to make money (which is fine) by manipulating human behavior and perceptions&#x2F;ideas about what &quot;normal&quot; is.

It&#x27;s disheartening to hear :) It also proves that people who predicted this for the metaverse were right. I thought i was the only one not getting it because i am old :)<p>Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, has declared that 2023 will be the “year of efficiency” at his company. So far, efficiency has translated into mass layoffs.

Funny, I thought working at Meta would be the thing that would create a morale crises at Meta.

The absentee boss thing is real across the industry right now. What are these managers doing? Consulting? Working other jobs? They are certainly not engaged at work.

If only I could remember where I left that tiny violin...

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I can&#x27;t help wondering if Meta is suffering death by GDPR and co. Meta really had only one revenue stream: ads. Given the recent GDPR fines, it&#x27;s clear that personalized ads are increasingly illegal in the EU. Other jurisdictions will follow suit (e.g. CCPA).<p>Contrast that with Google, who, although makes tons of ad money, had other revenue streams: cloud, workspace, YouTube Joins, pay, App Store, etc.

The layoffs will continue until the stock (market) improves.

As AI takes over, it is going to get worse.

How&#x27;s the morale at Twitter?

I would think working at Meta at all would be a morale crisis.

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This is totally an aside, but Im not into crypto and have a fairly negative connotation with it but I don’t necessarily think crypto is bullshit. I think the problem with crypto is that it misjudges the world, or is at least positioned for a very cynical version of the world that doesn’t currently exist.<p>Is crypto kept alive on evangelism? Yes.<p>Not really that useful at the moment (and maybe never will be)? Yes.<p>Has lots of pump and dump, scams, bad people doing bad stuff? People who have no clue what they’re talking about spewing bullshit? Resounding yes.<p>But I don’t think it’s bullshit because it does solve a real problem - verifying transactions independently. But of course there are trade offs with this, such as bitcoin’s power consumption. The disconnect comes from crypto people misjudging the world. The current financial system simply isn’t so bad to require all the weird trade offs of crypto.