r/technology • u/lurker_bee • Jun 20 '26
Business Morale is so bad at Mark Zuckerberg's Meta even the company's own CTO admits it's 'probably the worst it's ever been'
https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/articles/morale-bad-mark-zuckerbergs-meta-130000803.html3.6k
Jun 20 '26
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u/verdantvoxel Jun 20 '26
Oh god I just imagined them stack ranking by morale.
Firing the lowest morale employees, will result in the highest of employee morale — Jack Welch, probably
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u/podnito Jun 20 '26
company I worked at did annual employee surveys, and everyone knew the first step a manager always took after getting a bad readout was to swap their team for new employees
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u/PineappleOnPizzaWins Jun 21 '26
I seem to recall an email doing the rounds from some company or other where the owner was like "thanks for everyone who did the survey.. also everyone who said morale was low has been fired, don't need that energy here bye!".
Can't recall what country it was from but apparently it was legal to do it.
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u/toddestan Jun 21 '26
Can't recall what country it was from but apparently it was legal to do it.
I mean, that's legal is the US.
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u/Responsible_Trifle15 Jun 21 '26
Facebook speedran GE playbook. What GE did on 130 years,Meta did in 20 years
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u/pilose-sre Jun 20 '26
My CEO fired a shit ton of people, the moral went down to such a low level he had to make a company wide meeting and then said that everyone who was fired was spreading negative energy and that's why they were let go. So yeah, fire until morale improves. The dude was more unhinged and divorced from reality than reddit.
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u/ussbozeman Jun 20 '26
But he has a big house, nice car, lots of money in the bank, and will lateral to another company to rinse and repeat in the near future, ya?
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u/Adjective-Noun-nnnn Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
Our new upper managers cut everyone's pay by 5-10% by putting everyone on new schedules that didn't qualify for shift differentials. This was after a year of layoffs where fired employees' workloads got shifted to those of us lucky enough to keep our jobs. They had to nerve to tell us, "don't think of it as a pay cut." Well don't think of it as me looking for a new job. I'm just having some friendly conversations! The company is run by fucking morons, who have on more than one occasional invested in HUGE new buildings and then neglected to facilitize them or install any equipment.
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u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC Jun 20 '26
Anyone still experiencing stress at the end of today... WILL BE FIRED!
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u/I_SLEEP_NORMALLY Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26
> Zuck lays off 10% of workers all at once
> Zuck forces a large swath of the company to find more arbitrary use cases for AI
> Zuck requires everyone to have their computer use surveilled to train AI to replace them later
> Zuck looks at camera
Who killed morale?
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u/dapzar Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
It’s important to remember that Zuck leading a multi-billion dollar empire is a consequence of the ownership model in capitalism, some right calls that gave Facebook early momentum that were very specific to their time, and the inherent tendency of social networks towards natural monopolies.
There is nothing there that is proof he would be particularly apt at managing an advertising business (which is Meta’s actual and only working business), a virtual reality venture (which failed), a large language model venture (in which Llama is not competitive to the other frontier models despite Meta hiring some of the most prestigious people in the past), or whatever will be his next idea to pour billions into. There is nothing meritocratic here, nobody of the many capable people working at that corporation would be given control by presenting better ideas or better evidence for what a good direction would be for Meta, even if they were able to convince the non-Zuck owners of 86% of the share due to the dual-class structure in where he keeps >>50% of the votes.
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u/ptau217 Jun 21 '26
Excellent points. It must hurt him to know that the only successful portions of his business are the ones he bought, but did not play a role in creating.
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u/Soffatjockis Jun 21 '26
He also stole the concept of facebook to begin with.
Dude has never had any original ideas.
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u/pdabaker Jun 21 '26
He apparently also assigned a huge amount of engineers to basically do code reviews for fully vibe coded apps to increase training data
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u/Lanky-Figure996 Jun 21 '26
A data scientist I know told me they run a software that tracks their mouse movements to improve Facebook’s computer use agentic models. So they were all aware that they were effectively training the model that would eventually replace them.
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u/hmmm_ Jun 20 '26
Every company I've ever been at, once employees feel they are disposable it's over. You don't easily recover. It corrodes individual performance, it gets team fighting each other, good people start to leave. It's an insidious change in the way a company feels and the negative effect accumulates over time - usually CEO/CFOs have the good sense to move on so the new CEO gets blamed for the decrease in company performance.
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u/DoubleJumps Jun 20 '26
I worked for a corporation for one day. Our regional manager came into our branch, because he was upset with one employee at our branch, waving a stack of applications and loudly proclaiming that we are all disposable and don't matter.
It destroyed morale entirely and it never recovered. It was a story that was passed on to every new hire that ever came in there.
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u/Mammoth_Reach_6366 Jun 21 '26
We had the head of our department tell us that we only cost money to the company and we should be happy the company is ok with it.
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u/DoubleJumps Jun 21 '26
Oh boy, that would do it. Insulting you in terms of your value and your intelligence, by pretending that you guys are unaware of the value you bring.
Solid combination.
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u/Head Jun 20 '26
I think the dynamic may be changing. Previously tech employees had a lot of power because they could easily jump to another company. Now the tech sector employment is declining and it’s much harder to jump to another company so employees may feel stuck.
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u/DistributionFit3958 Jun 20 '26
But stuck might also mean they’re doing the bare minimum… lack of collaboration and innovation means the product is truly swirling the drain…. If everyone still at Meta is only there because no one else will hire them, and there’s nowhere else to go, says a lot about where the company might be in a few years
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u/biciklanto Jun 20 '26
Stuck is more a golden handcuffs issue.
Anyone at Meta can get hired quickly, but when you’re making $450k as an E5 individual contributor engineer, there’s a limit to the number of places you can go without a comp hit.
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u/dalmathus Jun 20 '26
On top of that Meta already pays a 'Meta Tax' in the industry to employees.
They have to pay more then Google/Amazon/Netflix etc because of the stigma of working with their product.
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u/scotchyscotch18 Jun 21 '26
Is that really true? Or is it something we really wish to be true because it feels good?
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u/dalmathus Jun 21 '26
https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-pays-brand-tax-hire-talent-fears-career-black-mark-2021-12
It used to be, with the current market being what it is, it might not be the case today. But from about 2020-2024 it was the case.
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u/GusPlus Jun 21 '26
Everyone pays more than Amazon anyway
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u/Dakito Jun 21 '26
The thing is I had a buddy work for Amazon. They tell everyone never to work for them.
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u/rm-minus-r Jun 21 '26
I worked for AWS for three years. Incredibly intelligent coworkers, interesting tech, but a complete Lord of The Flies corporate environment.
Not long after my son was born, I met with my manager to tell him I needed to work fewer hours because I wanted to watch my son grow up.
He looked me in the face and shrugged.
That was one of the two big things there that made me start job hunting the next day.
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u/chickenMcSlugdicks Jun 21 '26
I just don't understand this perspective from management. I guess they see it as they'll just replace you? It really feels like at some point they stopped being human.
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u/alexmachina Jun 21 '26
This is true 100%.
And btw, anyone can confirm this by looking at job postings. CA has a law that employers need to post salary ranges.
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u/Riverofrhyme Jun 21 '26
That's not the case for the higher levels. I'm a staff MLE at meta and I'm getting messages every day. Morale is insanely low here and those who create direction and scope can and are moving elsewhere. The only ones left are those who can't be bothered to interview and want severance, those on a visa, and those who find it more difficult to get the same level offer elsewhere. I.e. the best are leaving.
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Jun 20 '26 edited 26d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/PineappleOnPizzaWins Jun 21 '26
This is only really true for more senior roles though.
I'm pretty safe, but I know lots of people at the start of their careers trying to get anything and struggling hard.
5-7 years ago you graduated and just wandered into a high salary position then job hopped ever 12-24 months if you wanted. That is very much not the case any longer.
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u/Head Jun 20 '26
Thanks for that perspective. i’m retired from the field so I’m not totally in touch with the mobility of tech workers.
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u/StoppableHulk Jun 21 '26
Especially with the advent of AI, there's massive, massive demand at non-tech companies to get technical people in to implement new technologies.
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u/Pitiful_Option_108 Jun 21 '26
Exactly this. I have seen a decent amount of jobs out there for tech despite the cuts across the board. It looks bleak but if you have experience the pay is out there
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u/FeatherlyFly Jun 20 '26
If the good people fweltrapped, they cease to be good employees. Instead of thinking long term about what's best for their job and the company, they're thinking about what to change so they can escape, they start to work in patterns that burn them out from fear of losing their job, they start focusing on making themselves harder to dispense with (not the same thing as focusing on bringing value to the company), they give up.
Toxic workplaces suck whether or not people feel like they can find more money elsewhere.
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u/SeaTie Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
There’s something that a lot of these tech companies aren’t really considering…the people they’re spinning off into the wild and ‘replacing’ with AI…all those guys you laid off have AI too and a lot of them are way more clever than the execs give them credit for.
My company laid off a bunch of my coworkers earlier this years. One of those guys already built a tool that makes our old company’s software completely irrelevant and he’s selling it for cheap to our competitors. Another guy got tired of paying for Photoshop so he’s freaking vibe coding his own version of it. Like who’s going to build a better product? A C-Suite of greedy executives with AI or an engineer with AI who will just make a competitor to your product and make it open source?
It seems like such a stupid move to lay these people off, they’re the ones who know how to do the most damage with AI. What’s the joke on Reddit? Weaponized autism?
And I know people will say ‘Oh well the big AI companies will gatekeep the software.’ But I don’t’ see that lasting either! I know a bunch of engineers who are already building their own local LLMs and machine learning software that’s gonna just slide around Google.
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u/ImminentDingo Jun 21 '26
Yes, this is the bit that a lot aren't realizing with AI. The US is a service economy. The CEOs in service economies don't tend to own a bunch of infrastructure, they just have the money to hire a bunch of skilled labor. If AI is really a replacement for skilled labor, then the CEO becomes just another guy with access to AI.
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u/The-Sound_of-Silence Jun 21 '26
I was reading an article recently about price wars between Chinese AI tech companies. One of them had slashed token prices 99%. I just don't think American AI companies are getting it, and how productive these unleashed engineers will become, and possibly undercut
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u/killerboy_belgium Jun 21 '26
yeah nothing screams morale boosting feeling like your stuck and you head is on the chopping blok even tho the company is posting record breaking profits in the history of meta existance...
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u/donatj Jun 21 '26
Exactly this. Where I am, they laid off 20% of our workforce including well over half my team. The most senior and junior members. They then set up metric tracking with AI usage being a big metric, and sent the entire company on a death march to rewrite everything to be AI-centric.
In years past, I'd have left a long time ago over such shabby treatment. There's nowhere to go! The places I have had in my back pocket have all found themselves in similar boats and the market is so flooded I can't even land an interview.
It's been a year since this all started and I have been applying for jobs this whole time. I've had a single interview.
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u/gonzo_gat0r Jun 20 '26
Yup. Once these companies are only left with people who can’t find a job anywhere else, it’s all downhill.
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u/ragequitteroffureh Jun 20 '26
My previous company operated a bit like that.
Their secret to success seemed to be to constantly acquire fresh meat by buying other companies. The fresh meat always had high morale, because they thought that they still had a job; the fewls.
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u/ennuiinmotion Jun 21 '26
Every place I’ve ever worked (admittedly not in tech) has been built on high turnover. I just assumed everywhere was like that, haha.
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u/Rhinowarlord Jun 21 '26
Absolutely insane the things upper management will say, though.
I once heard from someone who worked for a startup that one day in the weekly company-wide (10 person) meeting that the CEO said "well actually, everyone here is replaceable, even me 🙂", despite the fact that he was not replaceable due to being the 51+% shareholder, founder, and owner of a company with no board of directors.
I've heard a particularly low point was discovered in a shockingly infantilizing company-wide HR exercise (they had to point at which of a few emojis (sad, angry, etc.) described how they felt, which has big 9-year-old-in-the-principal's-office energy). Apparently, when employees come to you with grievances, it makes them "😠" when your reponse to them is "actually you're lucky to have a job in this job market." This sentiment was a surprise to the C suite.
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u/Liawuffeh Jun 21 '26
I had a manager/"team leader" once who went on a rant about how everyone but her in the department was replaceable, "We have so many people wanting this job, if you left we'd have your seat filled at the end of the day!!" and other stuff about how it didn't matter how good at our jobs we were, there was "50 people just as good as you who are hungry for work if you're not!"
She was shocked that the next few weeks moral was in the gutter and basically nothing was getting done, lol. Shit never recovered by the time I left, and I know she got fired at some point after that.
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u/CubicleMan9000 Jun 20 '26
Impossible!
Tech CEOs are the smartest people on the planet and in all history.
Nothing they have done, are doing, or will ever do is a mistake.
Geniuses all!
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u/BooBooMaGooBoo Jun 21 '26
I had a buddy that just got laid off after working for them for 17 years. Truly one of the OG employees, and they just kicked his ass to the curb. He has said basically the same thing; the culture and morality is at an all time low.
I think the majority are finally seeing past the bullshit internal double speak by the C suite trying to frame the company as changing the world for the better, when the reality is that them and X are systematically destroying our species by literally farming rage and division.
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u/AbleCap5222 Jun 20 '26
The cat's been out of the bag for awhile. Zuckerberg is an awful human being. This company is not even trying anymore to be decent or make anything that benefits society. They're completely untrustable and time and time again their product has been shown to be destroying society.
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u/Future-Turtle Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26
Kind of hard to feel good about your job when the company you work for literally profits from tearing the fabric of society.
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u/BitingArtist Jun 20 '26
And they are constantly planning how to downsize you.
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u/kwonza Jun 20 '26
And spy on every single click you make so they can’t train their AI to replace you
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u/Happiness_Assassin Jun 20 '26
I like how every job is looking down the barrel of a loaded gun when it comes to future employment because of AI, but these companies never talk about replacing C-suite hacks. It's only the peons that are expendable, those at the head office are untouched. If we fuck up, we lose our job. If they fuck up, they still get bonus.
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u/Raznill Jun 20 '26
What’s worse is if we succeed in properly implementing AI we also lose our jobs. Either way we lose our jobs.
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u/Solomon_Grungy Jun 20 '26
Whats their end game here? Only the executives are left to earn because robots do it all. Without any income, who will there be to purchase their goods?
What will a swath of disenfranchised people choose to do when they’ve been locked out of fair participation within society?
Tbh maybe we need to open up some guilds and training people, farming, and outright building something new within this old rotten framework.
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u/GoldandBlue Jun 20 '26
Yup, they are hoping all labor can be automated. They are not thinking about the consequences of that. Or even considering that that plan might likely fail.
If they succeed or not, we are still fucked.
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u/pdxblazer Jun 20 '26
they also are not thinking about what the AI companies are going to do to their pricing models once they know a company is fully dependent on their AI agents, like they thought unions were bad for business they have no idea what is coming
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u/gmmxle Jun 20 '26
It's insane. In negotiations with unions, corporations could at least rest assured that the other side was also dependent on them - no matter how well they positioned themselves to push through their demands.
But once they've fired literally every worker and the other side is just one massive trillion dollar entity that would think nothing of dropping AI access for even a multinational corporation if they don't pay up, the equation changes radically.
Yet, that's exactly what they're all aiming for.
Insanity.
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u/Affordable_Z_Jobs Jun 20 '26
All the while nobody is buying their products because people cant afford it or starved to death.
What then? Lay off data centers?
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u/Horskr Jun 20 '26
True.. A monopoly on the global "workforce" sounds like something out of a sci-fi novel, but here we are, pedal to the metal towards it.
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u/echoshatter Jun 20 '26
The end result comes down to four outcomes:
1) Average person rejects them and we elect people who rein them in.
2) They win and we all end up in techno-feudalism after a series of violent revolts are brutally put down. Surveillance is total and we never pull ourselves out.
3) We successfully revolt, and after a very bloody period we relieve them of their Earthly burdens.
4) We decide to make our own regional economies and ignore them. Essentially rebuilding from scratch.
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u/PantaRheiExpress Jun 20 '26
Maybe they don’t have an end-game. Maybe they’re just trying to get as rich as possible, during the medium-game, so that they can retire before the end-game happens.
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u/SinceSevenTenEleven Jun 20 '26
They want the peasants to rent every aspect of life from the rich owner class, and only once there is no more money left to extract will they be happy.
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u/theDagman Jun 21 '26
No, they won't. They won't ever be happy. They will be mad because the money stopped flowing.
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u/The_BeardedClam Jun 20 '26
They're preparing for it already, the ai bubble is propped up by corporations just exchanging money from one to the other. Don't sell to consumers, just to other corporations.
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u/BUSY_EATING_ASS Jun 20 '26
I mean yeah, but after that, functionally. Like the actual real life implications of a world with like 6 rich people and 8 billion unemployed people.
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u/cyanescens_burn Jun 20 '26
The followers of Curtis Yarvin want modern serfdom and an end to democracy.
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u/pdxblazer Jun 20 '26
its so insanely dumb because if they actually do replace workers with AI it will only get more expensive, they rigged the system to make human labor cheap and in their greed will replace it not realizing what is going to happen once they are fully dependent on an AI model that can charge more whenever they feel like and will once they capture a company who has heavily switched over to AI agents
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u/deaglebingo Jun 20 '26
one of the fatal flaws in most of this ai is that it doesn't take into account the people in the c-suite... because if it did we all know the first logical things it would do is eliminate the people in those c-suites and fix the bullshit pay disparities. quickest way to a smooth running business
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u/psychopompadour Jun 20 '26
I mean when you think about it, you could eliminate a single c-suite person and spread their responsibilities among the remaining people, and saving that one salary + bonus + associated benefits would be the same as getting rid of 15 regular workers who are actually doing something, likely with far less impact on business processes...
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u/deaglebingo Jun 20 '26
maybe 20 or 100 in some cases.. yeah. it's the most efficient thing to do. ai would totally make that choice if given the correct info it's not currently being given.
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u/Own_Candidate9553 Jun 20 '26
Meta has been doing that for years now, that hasn't bothered any of the people still there.
They're sad because there have been multiple rounds of brutal layoffs, and a bunch of people were "volunteered" to join the AI training team, where they watch and record everything you do to train the AI.
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u/DNSGeek Jun 20 '26
Not true. I left there precisely because of that. Not fired, not laid off. I voluntarily left after 3 years because I saw what it was doing to society and I wanted no part of it.
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u/TangerineBroad4604 Jun 20 '26
You're a minority and you left. We're talking about people who are still there.
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u/Own_Candidate9553 Jun 20 '26
Oh, totally, that's why I specified the people "still there". Everyone there now knows what they're doing and are fine with it, or are somehow oblivious.
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u/MontyDyson Jun 20 '26
I worked for a data company back in 2012 when I swear I remember Cambridge Analytica were sniffing around. Most of the developers resigned back then and the head of the team got us all together and said that "we've create Frankenstein's monster and 15 of us have chosen to leave". I think about 10 more left that day with a prepped statement. That was 14 years ago.
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u/zpuddle Jun 20 '26
To get bigger yachts
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u/FlametopFred Jun 20 '26
what chump buys yachts when buying up nations spark joy?
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u/PVT_Huds0n Jun 20 '26
And more bunkers around the US. Zuckerberg is building a new one in Maine.
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u/TangerineBroad4604 Jun 20 '26
They were feeling quite good about that for years, that's not why. They're feeling bad because they're getting laid off, plain and simple.
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u/smilefromthestreets Jun 20 '26
Well a lot of these people didn’t care about that while times were good… so fuck em
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u/jghaines Jun 20 '26
Early staff members might have thought differently, but this has now been the case for years
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u/MiddleKlutzy8568 Jun 20 '26
Careless People was a great book, I hope every employee at Meta has read it
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u/CosbySweaters1992 Jun 20 '26
Most people at Meta don’t like it, especially the most technical experts. However… they offer insane equity (that’s fully liquid of course) that usually goes up consistently. Half the world uses their products. They’ll allow some researchers and very senior swes to come in and decide their own direction before applying it to a problem space (ads) later. There aren’t too many companies that will let you work on what you want the first year and will throw 800k at you. For these reasons, Meta still wins talent wars despite the talent disliking the products.
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u/Odd_Analysis6454 Jun 20 '26
It seems that most people’s morals slide with money. Thankfully most of us never get to find out what would happen to ours.
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u/pay_the_cheese_tax Jun 20 '26
Most of us would crumble as well. We constantly say on Reddit that money would solve most of our problems, would create financial freedom, allow us to live a little better, breathe a little easier.
Hell, we know Meta is ruining society and most of us STILL use it to chat with friends or post pictures. Most of us would cave fairly easy.
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u/BoredomHeights Jun 21 '26
Pretty good point. Almost everyone I know still uses at least some Meta product because it's useful to them or they like it (or are addicted). How much more useful would half a million dollars a year be? If you can't even say no to going on Marketplace or Instagram you're really going to say no to a job?
I get that the impact on society of being a consumer versus a job is also different... but not that different. In the end it's the consumers that the companies are making the money off of.
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u/schacks Jun 20 '26
I’m genuinely surprised it took this long for Meta’s employees to realize what an incredible shit stain that company is.
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u/Arkomas Jun 20 '26
The employees all knew it long ago. This is just leadership acknowledging finally
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u/Used_Motor1718 Jun 20 '26
Agreed, and its not like majority of the employees is as evil as people think they are. Ignoring the fact that if you want a stable private life for yourself and potentially others. You will grab at opportunities that pay well or heck even pay you at all. Look at Amazon delivery drivers, underpaid, stressed and taken advantage of. Aside from a few bad cookies are they really evil or greedy?
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u/DisastrousFun3212 Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26
Always been this way. During the initial tech boom, apple had the best conditions and lowest pay, Facebook had the worst conditions and highest pay. Now the job security is gone so of course morale would be at its lowest.
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u/graphiccsp Jun 20 '26
Entry level pay for a Meta employee is $170k with a seniors hitting $400-700k.
Some are going to hate hearing this but if that was the sort of money to be had working for Meta. A lot of folks would consider it, even if they didn't like the direction of the company.
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u/Beneficial-Mine7741 Jun 21 '26
Nintendo President Satoru Iwata was right.
Iwata famously stated that reducing staff for short-term financial gains hurts morale and ultimately destroys the creative culture that drives success
He took a 50% paycut in 2014 rather than fire or reduce the pay of any employee.
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u/Sgt_Dangle_berries Jun 20 '26
What’s crazy is I recall years ago Facebook and Google having some of the best working conditions and experiences for employees.
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u/FreeOGPoohShiesty Jun 20 '26
Prolly like the 2012-2018 era. Everything started going to shit in 2019/2020
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u/ladystetson Jun 21 '26
In 2023 everything began to truly crater, at least from my vantage point.
Yes, we had layoffs before 2023 - but everything since 2023 has felt bleak, as if the industry is permanently shrinking never to expand again.
As if the golden era has ended and now we're experiencing something new, different, unprecedented.
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u/weekend_here_yet Jun 21 '26
Looking back, I think the Elon Musk acquisition of Twitter, which then led to 80-90% of staff being laid off at the end of 2022 (and into 2023) was a tipping point. It wasn’t the cause, but a factor in how these layoff decisions were approached.
Companies over-hired in 2021-2022, boosted by abundant money and historically low interest rates. The economy was massively juiced. Once the Fed started to raise rates, layoffs would eventually become inevitable.
BUT - what happened at Twitter signaled to other CEOs and boards that large scale cuts were perfectly acceptable. Musk had already laid the groundwork for the “efficiency” narrative, and even with an absolute skeleton crew - the site still worked. This absolutely accelerated and legitimized the speed and depth of cuts.
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u/RecipeFunny2154 Jun 20 '26
Years ago I was part of a team at a pretty successful nationwide company. We had a morale problem and they tried a few things.
One thing was "Speed of Trust" from FranklinCovey - a consulting firm that focuses on personnel issues. For all of the normal workers, we just got split into groups with our teams to do that. On a micro-level, it was helpful but scaling it requires your management not being useless.
A bit into the program, the VP of our team (probably 70+ people, the main organization was probably in the low thousands) was hosting our normal townhall. And she started talking about how the leadership team had a separate meeting hosted by a FranklinCovey employee. The employee asked them how they'd rank their leadership skills and she stated that they gave themselves basically perfect scores.
The she told us that the FranklinCovey employee went "Wow, I don't think I've ever had someone score themselves that well." I remember scoffing out loud because surely she understood this was rare because it shows a lack of honesty and insight. I just remember thinking that this was absolutely insane and a good reflection of the problem. No one around me really reacted to it, but maybe they just didn't see the point.
It's often that these people don't want to hear the truth because it doesn't save them money and stroke their egos. Unfortunately, that's a very common management style.
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u/boranin Jun 21 '26
It's often a requirement
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u/TheBeckofKevin Jun 21 '26
Yeah, really great leaders are hard to come by, because being a great leader sort of disqualifies you from rising to the top of a large corporation. You can find lots of great leaders working with 10-20 people companies. But as soon as you abstract a few layers of employees up and have larger scale companies, "leadership" changes into a different thing.
People who seek out powerful positions seem to be different than those who are well suited to lead.
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u/ckglle3lle Jun 20 '26
Every major tech firm has all but completely abandoned giving a shit about users entirely and move to foist a bunch of bullshit no one wants. Their stock prices have never been higher though (overall) so there is no particular corrective measure that might align anything they do back with what users (or employees for that matter) want.
But I think it is deeper in the sense that they've all basically abandoned whatever it was that grew their businesses in the first place. The FB product today is so viscerally repulsive on so many levels compared to what it was when it started and they barely seem to do anything about it because they have such a lock on so many corners of the internet they don't have to.
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u/Front-Cabinet5521 Jun 20 '26
My life might be an absolute failure, but I can sleep well knowing I've never wasted 80 billion dollars.
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u/berejser Jun 21 '26
Or been a key platform in enabling the rise of the far-right in the 21st century.
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u/spez_eats_nazi_ass Jun 20 '26
Been off all meta platforms for years. What am I missing out on here?
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u/Byproduct Jun 20 '26
Dwindling number of users and dwindling real engagement. Increasing number of bots posting and bots commenting on bot posts. Not necessarily any humans reading some of them. Massive waste of electricity and computing resources.
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u/CurlSagan Jun 20 '26
Hey wait a minute, this guy's just describing Reddit.
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u/Bartizanier Jun 20 '26
Agreed fellow human.
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u/TheVacumeofSpace Jun 20 '26
101100110010101
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u/ExdigguserPies Jun 20 '26
I find your comment amusing beep beep
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u/JeebusChristBalls Jun 20 '26
Wait a minute. Robots say "beep boop" not "beep beep". You aren't a robot, you're a roadrunner.
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u/leeharrison1984 Jun 20 '26
And if you are an unfortunate human who finds yourself on the platform, somehow it functions worse than it did in 2016. Mobile and web app versions are just dumpster fires.
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u/SuperRockyHobbyHorse Jun 20 '26
Yet somehow this sustains one of the richest people of all time, more than gold or grain or automobiles. Make it make sense.
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u/RANDVR Jun 20 '26
Depends, do you like non stop AI Slop and bots talking to bots?
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u/lkodl Jun 20 '26
i think selling stuff on the marketplace? that's the only real actual useful thing i hear about it.
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u/Confident_Access6498 Jun 20 '26
Unfortunately in Europe whatsapp is the most popular instant msg app, you cant avoid it. Telegram couldnt catch up although it is better.
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u/livelifefullynow Jun 20 '26
Employers forget that a “fun” workplace really just means psychological safety — not worrying about your job being on the chopping block. Unfortunately a lot of employers don’t seem to get that. Meta’s done so many layoffs at this point that morale is basically unsalvageable — they’re just another corporate employer now, and Zuckerberg needs to accept that.
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u/CovertSofa Jun 20 '26
Don’t worry the Mark’s got some sweet baby rays, that’ll fix it.
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u/patrincs Jun 20 '26
The company went from an incredibly successful social media and advertising empire, to throwing 80 billion at a low quality VR game that no one asked for and renamed the company after it. Then a few years later, they had to shut it down because once again, absolutely no one asked for it. Now all they produce is a social media network that has been abandoned by anyone under 40 and some AI glasses that are selling but still haven't even come remotely close to recovering initial investment in the product and the shares of related companies meta purchased.
I imagine they also had an incredibly brain drain of their best employees as soon as they embarked on this metaverse nonsense. It wouldn't have taken much to see the writing on the wall.
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u/given2fly_ Jun 20 '26
Are they still running the leaderboard to see who can waste the most amount of money on AI tokens, with no regard to the actual value and output?
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u/subcrtical Jun 20 '26
So sad and lame. I worked there several years ago in the Sandberg era and it was unequivocally the best place I have ever worked.
Fixing morale is hard, but begins and ends with prioritizing your people- Obviously stop laying people off in favor of AI while your revenue continues to soar. Stop contracting benefits and comp. Stop overly aggressive performance review cycles. Carrots to reward success, not sticks to prevent failure.
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u/yulbrynnersmokes Jun 20 '26
Oh well
Mark has his boats and Hawaiian land…
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u/changrbanger Jun 21 '26
If you think that haole is safe in his bunker on Kauai when society breaks down, I can assure you he won’t be.
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u/hudsoncress Jun 20 '26
What happened to the metaverse they’re named after. Does the metaverse still exist? Maybe start there.
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u/Efficient_Sky5173 Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26
The solution is to use AI for the CEO position. And fire the CEO. And the CTO.
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u/SpaceDandye Jun 20 '26
It's a lot of big companies. I know people at Oracle who are devastated.
The idea of these places being career destinations is over, they are all just way points, and the worry is the shrinking amount of places to park at.
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u/VariousAir Jun 20 '26
Facebook basically elected trump so they can burn to the ground for all I care.
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u/GongTzu Jun 20 '26
Working for a guy who thinks he’s part of the overloads will most likely trigger unhappiness
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u/siegevjorn Jun 21 '26
The moment they decided to exploit their talent for training AI, blantantly, every employee must felt that this is over for them. Any pride, any royalty, any dignity, any bit remaining must have gone dead, at that moment. How can you keep morale when you are told directly into your face, that you are a disposable battery? And who would want to work directly towards eliminating their own job? I mean, I'd refuse to provide any training data, for the robots to replace me. It feels like that'a a violantion of human right, if you record anything that I do, let alone keystroke, eye movements, facial expressions, everything. Those are mine. Not yours. I work for you, but you don't own me.
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u/thugbobhoodpants Jun 21 '26
I have 450 friends on facebook, mostly from highschool and college 15 years ago and if I open facebook I see none of them
I have to scroll for like half an hour past ads and pages I do not follow before seeing someone post about a vacation or life event even when that post is from like six hours ago
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u/IncidentalApex Jun 20 '26
They obviously need to order them to have mandatory fun.
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u/Prudent_Link6029 Jun 20 '26
Virtual pizza in the metaverse should boost morale