Is 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?

I have a low but not infrequent amount of direct exposure to him and honestly I think it's ~30% he is extremely ruthlessly competitive at any cost, and ~70% every semi-reasonable idea he has gets immediately twisted into cargo-culting, empire-building nonsense by the VP layer.

I wouldn't blame company culture on neurodivergents. It's explained by a stereotypical ruthless flavor of business, which reinforced itself with the culture they hired and nurtured.

The company has been known as kinda sketchy almost continuously since it was founded, yet people went there because it paid the most money.

If leadership is now thinking that an executive "ideas person", plus a small execution team fortified with AI, can bang out a product more quickly than the massive army of corporate workers they've been feeding at top of the market rates, and at the same quality level as the previous inefficient bureaucracy managed... isn't that plausibly correct?

Now, the company just needs to be the best-paying job available to enough of those workers. And the company believes this is getting easier for the company, due to the state of the job market. The workers who remain will remain motivated by money.

And the company may think they're not losing anything of value, since they knew that their culture was already sick.

Example: They think they weren't getting creative, aligned, diligent brilliance, amidst all the backstabbing and politics they'd created, and so mechanically executing on an executive ideas person's vision yields the same product result, faster.

From the outside, I think this shouldn't be a surprise, nor blamed on possible neurodivergence of individuals.

(Of course this isn't my own philosophy about morale and effective product teams, and I wouldn't want to work at a company like that. But you can see some company cultures from thousands of miles away.)

I think that Zuckerberg is driven by numbers/analytics and the competition. He was lucky enough to be made a king in this world before he was fully adult, he is likely unaware of many of the realities we take for granted, and why would he care? Money is good.

Same 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.

This is the guy who tried to make the metaverse a thing. He has been out of touch for decades now.

I personally believe that he is just piece of shit. Unhinged, greedy, selfish one. Some people are made this way, some people evolve into that state. I don't really think it's some sort of diagnosis.

We need to stop suggesting that someone who is "neurodivergent" is more likely to be a sociopathic asshole. The two are not related at all.

Back in the day you could mention in passing "oh that guy is on a spectrum", but it was always because they were awkward and quiet, not anti-social.

Zuck has spent his life from birth in a walled garden. He cannot relate to normal human emotions. In a way, that's not his fault, but we showered people like him with praise for being "geniuses" and "visionaries", which did not help matters.

"Dumb fucks"

Arguably hacking Crimson reporters when they tried investigating him for activities at Harvard

Buying Whatsapp so he can have a monopoly

Copying Snapchat multiple times

I mean, I can go on

The word is, Zuck is going through his midlife crisis (42 yo) and wants a tougher, more driven, and more masculine environment. Zuck has been pro-Trump for a while, and palling around with MMA guys. He's also open to importing 996 culture because of his appreciation of China, which stems from his Chinese wife.

Zuck probably has ADHD (or something like that). If you have experienced it or know people that do then you know that you tend to have tons of random ideas that seem good in the moment but a few days later you realize weren’t that great.

Now imagine every time one of these ideas happen a 2000+ person org immediately starts pivoting to work on it as its top priority.