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Meta's New Reality: Record High Profits. Record Low Morale
- jmuguy 5mo agohttps://archive.ph/BfugB https://archive.ph/BfugB
- SpicyLemonZest 5mo agoThis 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.
- hnthrow0287345 5mo agoThat 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.
- renegade-otter 5mo agoI 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.
- postexitus 5mo agoThey don't care. Only 5% of their people contribute to the bottom line. Rest are all deadweight.
- glaslong 5mo agoThis 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.
- throw4847285 5mo agoI survived two rounds of layoffs at a company. Each time there was a message from the CEO, and a drawn out process of learning who had kept their job and who hadn't. It was supposed to be more humane but it ended up making things much worse. When I was finally laid off, there was no notice at all. Ripping off the band-aid was better (though it still sucked).
- maxwellito 5mo agoI 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?
- tinfoilhatter 5mo agoI'm not a Meta engineer, but if I had to offer a guess, the answer would be money.
- scottious 5mo agoI 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
- afavour 5mo agoTotally understandable, and probably another reason why morale is so low, as employees watch the stock price and their personal fortunes fall.
- tinfoilhatter 5mo agoI 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.
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- zipy124 5mo agoGiven it's like 30 years of my salary I'd probably be willing to be miserable for a number of years.
- rwak12 5mo agoHow 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.
- mrhottakes 5mo agoThey'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!)"
- afavour 5mo agoI 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.
- loeg 5mo agoIt'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.
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- scylla 5mo ago
- glaslong 5mo agoCurrently 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.
- ninininino 5mo agoIs 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?
- hnthrow0287345 5mo agoSame 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.
- bluecheese452 5mo agoThis is the guy who tried to make the metaverse a thing. He has been out of touch for decades now.
- hsuduebc2 5mo agoExactly. The yes man culture must be pretty hard near him.
- simpaticoder 5mo agoIt'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.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5mo agoI 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 https://www.eff.org/pages/leaving-physical-world [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY
- jjulius 5mo ago>I probably made half of what I could have made, anywhere else... Peace of mind over peace of wallet for me, every time.
- shikshake 5mo agoHear hear. I feel lucky to have a stable job in education even if I make less than my big tech colleagues.
- chronogram 5mo agoPeace of mind largely depends on peace of wallet for a lot of people. Imagine a life without a care for accommodation or travel. Suddenly you can go wherever you want whenever you want and work on whatever you want without a care.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5mo agoGood point, but I know a number of pretty wealthy people. They have cares and stress, too; just different from your average Joe[line]. > and work on whatever you want without a care Many companies that pay you lots of money, do so, on the condition that you work on whatever they want you to work on. They also get first dibs on the benefits from that work, usually leaving you with fairly dilute equity, or controlled bonuses, if you're lucky.
- sklargh 5mo agoMeta 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.
- mrhottakes 5mo agoExtremely untrue. Meta is significantly worse than your average F500.
- ChrisArchitect 5mo agoRelated: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48077126 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48077126
- hirvi74 5mo agoRecord 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.
- stephc_int13 5mo agoI 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.
- percentcer 5mo agowhat is the Decimation thing?
- 1-more 5mo agoRoman legions would execute every 10th man as collective punishment. Kept the survivors in line. No idea if it ever actually happened.
- stephc_int13 5mo agoIt is something that occured a few times in Roman history. A collective punishment, 10% of the soldiers killed by their peers, randomly choosen.
- 1-more 5mo ago> 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.
- mrguyorama 5mo agoThe industry standardized on this as "Stack ranking" like two decades ago.
- stephc_int13 5mo agoThis is more of the Bezos style, maybe inspired by the same idea. Appears less random and continual.
- discordance 5mo agoHey 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.
- alex1138 5mo agoMyanmar 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198
- bradlys 5mo agoWonder when Americans will apply this to themselves with their own government which does far worse things everyday instead of posting these comments.
- BiteCode_dev 5mo agoYou 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.
- mannanj 5mo agoWho knows. Probably when they are pushed some more. Most populations you'll find will tolerate more abuse than you think; isn't it easy to measure the abuse factor of a peoples' by just measuring and varying the things like food, cost of living, basic comforts and then striving to meet just above the minimum threshold? And, finally, when you as a leader cannot meet those needs any longer, you push for war as the chimpanzee alphas do and prolong your position of power even longer. edit: to answer your question, I think when they are less sick, have more perceived power and agency. The Americans of today are more sick, more self-perceived as disempowered, and in general a naive and gullible, cowardice people.
- ryandvm 5mo agoTech 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.
- postexitus 5mo agoThey 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.
- bradlys 5mo agoThis 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.
- postexitus 5mo agoAgreed - 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.
- CodingJeebus 5mo agoA 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.
- farceSpherule 5mo ago[dead]
- ParanoidShroom 5mo agoYeah culture has gone too shit. Since Sheryl left
- martythemaniak 5mo agoThings 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.
- rybosworld 5mo agoThe 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.
- bossyTeacher 5mo agoMeta's sustained low morale leading to the departure of top talent and a subsequent decline of Whatsapp and Instagram will be a genuine gift to the world by Meta after decades of global damage. Looking forward to a world without them
- mdip 5mo agoThis is all an interesting read from where I sit -- I worked for a global multi-national telecom that spun off from the 1996 deregulated local carrier, was bought up by a dot-com bust company, promptly went bankrupt and was sold off various times. So ... I understand bad morale and 10% layoffs. We went from 25,000 employees (1998-1999) at peek to under 3,000 (2004ish?). I did 17 years of (at least) 10% cuts company-wide, often larger in IT, every 6-12 months. They're going to have a problem hiring, that's certain. They seem very unconcerned with that both with the drumbeat of layoffs and the forced spyware nonsense. I remember when things were at the worst at my company, HR did a company-wide "engagement" survey. Being in IT at the time, we worked closely with them to ensure as close to complete participation as possible. The theory behind it was that each employee (anonymous) would receive a ranking, bubbled up to segments within the company (less anonymous) and specific managers. The reason for the rush to get this out was fraud fears. I guess that number goes low enough to represent something near "an employee who feels morally obligated to destroy the organization", but the number of employees who fit in the range of "so disengaged from the company that they are probably engaging in fraud/theft" in the trial phase was an order of magnitude higher than the team had estimated. When things get that bad, it's tough to recover. In certain locations we had an impossible time hiring most positions -- we had a toxic reputation in a high-tech location with a lot of job openings; we were often the last choice of the worst candidates no matter what the position was.
- bamboozled 5mo agoI don’t like meta , but they have and endless supply of people who would sell their mother to work there. I’m sure about that. I’ve turned down lots of interviews there because I find working there to be morally bankrupt.
- black_13 5mo ago[dead]
- IshKebab 5mo ago> Median total compensation at Meta fell to $388,200 last year from $417,400 in 2024 My heart bleeds.
- kats 5mo agoThis Hacker News thread isn't useful at all. It's the same people that comment on every thread stating their opinions overconfidently. It's the same perpetually negative Wired article. These things would be the same no matter what is really going on, and so I can't use it to learn anything.
- zeroonetwothree 5mo agoCould be said of almost every HN thread to be fair
- syndacks 5mo agoImagine the cognitive dissonance at play there, doing some DS work, realizing your product actively makes people depressed...all while driving back to your 5M+ home in a Tesla listening to podcasts about sunning your ballsack
- bamboozled 5mo agoYup. "Bring the world closer together".
- amai 5mo agoUnionize now.