I've held a short list of organizations I wouldn't ever work for, for a long while. Meta is on that list, but so are most of the big tech companies you see in the various anagrams.

It's getting to the point where selling my soul to the highest bidder is going to be absolutely required for any big tech job going forward.

They won't reflect, these people literally have no morales. The only thing they value is money and giving teenage girls depression.

I think it says more about Metas inability to create new products or make investments.

Look at their big growth areas. They acquired instagram and WhatsApp. Threads seems successful(?) but is an extension of instagram.

Mostly they’ve just gotten better at weaponizing rage bait. Which I’d argue, long term, will be a losing strategy.

If this were a healthy culture, with all the people working there, Zuck would have promoted far more interesting internal experiment to full blown products. That just doesn’t seem to happen there.

Maybe it was needed until recently and today the scale and monopoly is sufficiently well oiled that a couple 1M$/month programmers with some clankers can ship some new buttons and keep it running?

> if your only business is selling ads to scammers to prey on the elderly?

Don’t forget failed, mentally ill, manic rebrands that cost billions and go nowhere.

Oh, and enabling human traffickers.

> selling ads to scammers to prey on the elderly

I thought that was YouTube's business model.

Now if you'll excuse me I need to purchase some phony dick pills and diabetes snake oil to go with my fake NASA-designed air conditioner.

You need a set of good lead engineers in monetisation who can hide the fraud well enough from the rest of the company

Facebook is for preying on the elderly. Instagram for the rest of us.

I had a friend who worked for Instagram post-acquisition left and came back to a team in Facebook.

They had always sung the praises of Instagram's culture but said they didn't recognize the company that they came back to. Literally night and day between the best and worst place they'd worked.

> Software developers in the US are seriously expensive, using them for data labeling would be a waste of resources.

The frontier work is on labeling and training expert content, by experts. It's unglamorous work and almost certainly doesn't warrant FAANG pay, but neither did most of the work that most FAANG engineers were already doing. But it does require competent talent from the expert domain.

Like their peer companies, Meta is still sitting on a huge pool of vetted-as-competant workers from the hiring boom and expert AI training is the most ripe business opportunity in a fragile economy where pretty much every comparable opportunity has evaporated.

Zuck literally said that he wants folks with higher intelligence on the Applied Intelligence team. And the best way to do that was to move folks internally, since they were "intelligent" enough to pass the Meta interviews.

Soooo, yes it is a waste of resources ($$$). But this was the initial intention.

The belief that engineers are not doing anything for x amount of time that could be better spent on other immediately measurable things is as old as the profession itself.

Ironically this vanishes when the tables are turned and we ask for things like better hardware or software. There are plenty of us here with stories of how much effort it took to convince employers that SSDs were worth it when they were new, small, and very expensive.

> Software developers in the US are seriously expensive, using them for data labeling would be a waste of resources.

Zuck basically went to a town hall and explained to his employees that their remaining value to him is as training mules for his AI.

It's only until Cold Harbor is completed.

>using them for data labeling would be a waste of resources

Would it? It seems like they can spend a few months extracting intelligence and "taste" from their engineers then get years worth of it back from the AI.

Isn't that Scale AI investment in a company that does labeling? what are we missing? Are we all going to be labelers soon too?

I believe it, because it makes a kind of sense. Post-training has a huge impact on how well LLMs perform, and labeled data is what determines the effectiveness of post-training. This is why companies like Anthropic are so worried about distillation.

So if you have access to a large number of highly skilled people, and you really don't absolutely need them to do other things, why wouldn't you force data labeling tasks on them?

Facebook is also planning a 10% layoff, so this also works as encouragement for people to leave voluntarily.

(Before you downvote me, note that I'm not endorsing this or saying it's a good idea. I'm just saying that I believe it's true, because I can see how Facebook's leadership would think it's a good idea.)

One thing I've learned over my career is that engineering seems to matter so little to a business's success. As long as the engineering problems and failures aren't so bad that the salesfolks will get crucified in the town square and convince customers to leave, then seemingly everything can eventually be duct-taped over.

Obviously this isn't as true for things where it truly matters - encryption software, financial software, etc. - but it's amazing how little engineering excellent has to do with a company's success.

Yes those are stable businesses, but we’re probably at peak social media. They need something new to be interesting in long term investment.

Zuck IMO doesn’t have the halo Musk has where there’s results mixed in with the BS. And Meta doesn’t seem to have a good track record of developing new products.

Is a rage bait machine currently at / near its peak of usage still an interesting investment in 2026?

Computer use

> my manager has no idea who I am, nor what I’m working on, and I’ve never met them despite me being on the team for nearly two months.

This is the fast track to being next in a round of layoffs. If your manager does not know you, they won’t vouch for you when it comes time to toss people out of the airlock. You are in a vulnerable position.

The elves are leaving Middle Earth..

This should be top comment. Organizations reflect their leadership and Zuck is a mess.

'The problem is'...

Problem? This is the best news I've heard in a while.

Also their AI efforts and metaverse efforts flopped

So there’s really not a lot of growth areas for them? Their biggest growth seems to have been acquisitions, not new features.

Maybe data labeling is like RTO - an intentional way to force attrition.

Because coding appears to be the most monetizable use of AI, for some time to come.

Maybe they're trying to digitize their best people.

Note that both kneecapped their previously quite open APIs, too.

That's what happens when you have leaderboards and internal spend rankings/comparisons. This isn't just a Meta thing; many companies are tracking tokens as performance metric but we all know this by now. :D

I think Tim Cook tried to...

Sure, the current Torment Nexus buildout might be a bubble. But just think: in 10 years we will already have all this torment infrastructure built, ready to use.