Good morning, my chronically employed friend. This week in the make work suck less group chat...

📮State of the business. Let's talk about Meta and my least favorite breed of executive: The Steve Urkel. The ones who will lay off 20,000 people and then turn around and say "Did I do that?" It's a particular mix of cruelty and incompetence that makes me want to stand on a dock and shine a 1 million lumen spotlight into Zuck's mega-yacht 24/7.

What's happening?

Pre-covid, Facebook put the F in FAANG - the top tech companies to work at. They gave you unbelievable, compensation, benefits, and/or resume building. Facebook and Google competed for the most outrageous perks designed to keep you in the office (and happy) all day. Free meals, on-site laundry and massages, massive stock grants, transportation and childcare benefits. Side note: I've spoken to leaders from both companies who've described their employees as entitled and spoiled. Do with that what you will.

Like the rest of tech, the tide turned at Meta (nee Facebook) in 2022 with the departure of Sheryl Sandberg (often cited as the adult in the room), leading Zuck's Year of Efficiency and downsizing, reduction of perks, and a hit to the once engineer-centric and flexible culture.

Meta invested billions in the metaverse which... didn't pan out. So now they're trying to keep up with the AI arms race. This Spring, they reassigned 6,500 core engineers to train their AI model, work these engineers consider tedious, menial, and definitely not what they were hired to do. It was either, join the AI org or resign. In this economy?! And last month, they laid off 10% of the company to free up more funding for AI development.

Did I do that?? In Meta's Chief Product Officer, Chris Cox's own words at an employee town hall, "It's like what the fuck." He described the current environment at the company as "running a marathon in the middle of a hailstorm and then like, your teammate gets replaced and then we're recording you." Meta CTO, Andrew Bosworth said the AI reorg was atrocious in an internal memo, promising better communication, career paths, and snacks.

🍕Snacks?! It's giving a Severance-style Waffle Party. I don't know if I have the words to describe how ineffective this will be to improve morale.

• A Meta employee posted on Blind "Meta is dead. Morale is dead. I survived [the May layoffs] but I don't think anyone who survived is working. No one is really focusing in meetings or anything, Everyone's just talking about the people who got laid off. A lot of high performers got laid off so no one is safe anymore. No one believes this is the end [of layoffs] so morale is down the toilet. All this collective trauma so that Meta can fund AI spending..."
• Another employee came off mute on a June town hall to "tell him he's a piece of shit" referring to an un-named AI org leader. Based on the hatred towards Alexandr Wang on Blind (twenty-something founder of Meta-acquired data-labeling startup Scale AI), I'm guessing it's him.

If you're at Meta (or recently departed) would love to hear what you think it would take to turn the culture around. I have ideas, but I want the inside edition.

Until next Saturday, you got this.
Cassandra

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