A Meta employee gets real about the horror of working there

https://sfstandard.com/pacific-standard-time/2026/05/15/meta-employee-gets-real-horror-working-right-now/

by forrestbrazeal • 2 months ago

105 92 2 months ago

rvz• 2 months ago

“This is as anxious and stressed as I have ever been at a job,” a longtime employee at Meta tells The Standard.

The music has stopped and is now leaving people playing the musical chairs game without a chair (job) to sit on as the companies are literally taking away the chairs.

Reminds me of 2008, and 2000 but this time the 'new jobs' are not there and the game is global and affects every knowledge worker and it doesn't matter if you're "senior", "junior" or "staff" or whatever.

Nothing lasts forever. Better build something instead of expecting employers for free lunch and daycare-like benefits.

cucumber3732842• 2 months ago

Reminds me of 2008, and 2000 but this time the 'new jobs' are not there and the game is global and affects every knowledge worker and it doesn't matter if you're "senior", "junior" or "staff" or whatever.

So like 2000 and 2008 if you worked in heavy industry.

johnvanommen• 2 months ago

So like 2000 and 2008 if you worked in heavy industry.

Ouch. Great point.

sillywabbit• 2 months ago

Internet Doomsday Evangelist seems to be a role with infinite chairs.

simianwords• 2 months ago

I think meta should have done what musk did and ripped the bandage off.

sidewndr46• 2 months ago

What exactly are you referring to?

nailer3• 2 months ago

Presumably reducing the entire company to a set of core engineers.

derwiki2• 2 months ago

Twitter, I presume?

cosmicgadget4• 2 months ago

You may have noticed Zuck is continually trying to make or buy the Next Big Thing. Elon mostly just wants to keep the lights on and shape content to his personal interests.

malfist2• 2 months ago

Please explain Tesla, spacex, PayPal, the boring company, xAI in your context of "just wants to keep the lights on"

tyre• 2 months ago

the framing that we are using this to train AI to do everyone’s job and the sort of unapologetic, ‘we’re training your replacement, and we’re not paying you more for it’ approach is just another signal of how little Meta cares about the humans that it employs

Look, I want everyone to be happy, but if you’re working at the addiction factory, I mean, let’s not kid ourselves about how much Meta cares about people.

surgical_fire2• 2 months ago

This initiative will fail like the Metaverse did.

riddlemethat• 2 months ago

People actually use AI. People do not use virtual reality headsets.

schmeichel• 2 months ago

See "Careless People" by Sarah Wynn-Williams. (That was even before Facebook became Meta)

treis4• 2 months ago

"That's what the money is for" - Don Draper

tedggh• 2 months ago

Meta preys on kids, not just “people”.

therealdrag04• 2 months ago

It doesn’t even really have anything to do with that. Training people’s replacements is as old as time. It’s business. Why would they pay above market rate just for fun?

zombot2• 2 months ago

I didn't hear anyone complain when Meta was only ruining other people's lives. I can't feel any sympathy now.

Also, if you promise to put everyone out of a job with AI, it's only logical to start with your own employees. Give everyone a preview of what's coming for them if the promises hold.

voidfunc• 2 months ago

Meta has a lot of overpaid employees for what is basically an image posting and message board app. Im extremely bullish on AI reducing expenses at Meta as an investor with little harm to the business.

malfist2• 2 months ago

Yeah! One of the most profitable companies in the world is just a message board and image host! I could build that in a weekend

sometimelurker2• 2 months ago

Meta is only network effects. You could build that in a weekend, and so could I. or you could just fork Mastodon. What keeps people from leaving is that their friends are still on it: network effects

CuriouslyC• 2 months ago

That's what it is to the end user. All the magic of Meta is in the dark surveillance and targeting, which is invisible to users.

wartywhoa23• 2 months ago

image posting and message board app.

Such a nice euphemism for data grabbing / social graph building / spying / AI training machine!

taylodl2• 2 months ago

Why do people continue to work at Meta? Especially when it's been clear to all for several years now that their plan to Change The World is to make the world a far worse place? Why do people want to be a part of that and remain a part of that?

Simulacra• 2 months ago

I think initially it was the challenge, possibilities and money. Now... maybe just the money?

derwiki2• 2 months ago

Great money and smart coworkers is what I hear

ilvez• 2 months ago

If one has already sold their soul to devil, what is there left to lose..

notnullorvoid• 2 months ago

Same reason people work at any of these big companies, money and prestige. You can be a terrible engineer, but if you have a few years experience at Meta it's going to make people think you must be a great one.

rurban• 2 months ago

Prestige for working at Meta? Certainly not!

It's like you are saying you worked at Microsoft, Oracle, HP or Cisco. Who wants to hire such people?

therealdrag04• 2 months ago

Why does basically everyone use Meta products? Despite the outrage, perhaps there’s an underlying sense that it’s not that bad.

dccoolgai5• 2 months ago

Imagine trying to hire engineers in 2 years with all of these stories lingering. There was maybe a brief window where "everyone understood" there had to be a correction to the post-pandemic overhiring spree... but we're well past that now. These companies doing this kind of performative cruelty have started their inexorable destruction.

brianwawok• 2 months ago

Idk, offer most people 300-500k and they will go eh, when can I start? You don’t know how many engineers in the world would take that.

spicyusername• 2 months ago

    It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

dccoolgai5• 2 months ago

Certainly, everyone has "a number" they're willing to suffer for - but telegraphing the suffering ensures that number will be maxed out and morale/motivation will be rock bottom. So: you're paying a huge premium for underperforming talent. Destruction.

staticassertion2• 2 months ago

You could have said this every year for so many years about so many companies. If people will work for Palantir, they'll work for Facebook. Facebook could be a lot worse and I think a lot of their employees would stick around.

I guess a response at the industry level would be not hiring ex-FB people etc, treating it as a red flag.

dccoolgai5• 2 months ago

You're confusing _evil_ with _cruel_. Palantir is the former, but from what I have heard they treat their employees well. They are attracting exactly the kind of people they want.

prinny_• 2 months ago

Is it expected to be hard? Meta currently employees a lot of people who are willing to be there for any number of reasons. If 2 years down the line Meta announces a hiring push offering the same or better compensation packages with the ones offering now I am sure people will flock to be there.

I think we should put behind us any discourse about companies risking their hiring pool by being hostile to the society or their own employees. People will definitely try to be hired at $company if it means six figure pay, doesn't matter the sector. We have plenty of examples for this.

dccoolgai5• 2 months ago

Like any market, they will not be the only ones in it. People remember how you treat them - especially in times like these. They will be paying premium prices for a demoralized workforce. They put themselves in a real tough position here.

ChiMan• 2 months ago

Covid-era over-hiring was never going to end well. If there’s any silver lining to this, it’s that with the AI tools used to AI-wash the dismissals, it’s easier than ever to bone up on economics and why it’s a bad idea to hire people without a clear view of the economic margins along which the employee will be profitable for the firm.

bonsai_spool• 2 months ago

Covid-era over-hiring was never going to end well

This is a convenient strawman for companies but I think it's no longer true that the people being layed off stem from that time: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platform...

Someone made a great post about other companies who have shed their 'covid excess' but are still citing that period as a motivation for their decisions.

nateglims• 2 months ago

Compared to recent trends it’s more like the entire 2010s was over hiring

cmiles82• 2 months ago

Meta isn’t going away anytime soon, but it’s on a slow and gradual decline into irrelevance. Ironically Zuckerberg has now broadly become the has-been geriatric business type he raged against so hard when Facebook began.

Companies in this stage default to exactly what Meta is doing, pound their employees with pointless initiatives and programs that just grind people to the bone and ultimately go nowhere.

cheschire• 2 months ago

He was done with Facebook. Then he read Ready Player One and thought fuck it, why not?

It was a bet. It didn’t pay off. His billions might be tied to the value of the company but his millions are safe and secure. He can keep taking bets for a long time.

Meta is just an investment vehicle for him at this point.

cmiles82• 2 months ago

Yes Zuckerberg will be fine. The employees caught up in his misadventures, maybe not so much.

treis4• 2 months ago

I dunno I think AI is pretty cataclysmic for the ad supported web. For one, why go to any webpage instead of reading the LLM summary. For two, why look at an ad riddled page when an LLM can clean it up for you.

cosmicgadget4• 2 months ago

Currently ad-free LLMs.

squiffsquiff• 2 months ago

One benefit: People are no longer trying to pretend that Meta is some beneficent orgainsation

Esophagus42• 2 months ago

So what I suspect I’ll feel if I get laid off is an immediate flood of relief and happiness, very quickly followed by the sinking realization that I’m in financial trouble, because I don’t know how long it will take to land another job. Six months should be enough — a couple of years ago, it would’ve been.

If you’re looking for a job with similar pay, sure.

But if you’re willing to accept that maybe you were making over market and your next job will be more of a paycheck reality check, then it should be easier to find work.

happytoexplain3• 2 months ago

Meta's morality aside, it's so strange seeing bitterness about software salaries on HN - very crabs-in-a-pot. Especially considering that the vast, vast majority of software jobs don't enable a life of luxury due to differences in COL.

Instead of insisting that more businesses should share enough profit to enable more people to live the Little American Dream (have a small home, small family, somewhere reasonably nice), we say the opposite, "No. People currently achieving that need to give it up." The bar is so low that this is what counts as "spoiled".

Esophagus42• 2 months ago

You’re making this about a lot more than my comment.

IG_Semmelweiss• 2 months ago

A few thoughts on the layoffs:

1) I know from an internal source that impact is known by now (this week) by the local leaders. There's a very specific criteria. This has been "socialized" with some survivors, but not all.

2) The Capex in building AI is what's causing this wave. That's not surprising.

3) The AI buildout caught a lot of companies with their pants down without financial firepower to make investments. People are surprised by new tech paradigms all the time, it's a permissible mistake. What's crazy is, why were these people hired in the 1st place. There would have been no bloodbath if that salary money was sitting in the balance sheet, as a muscle ready to be flexed. Instead, they just ate fat and now it needs to be trimmed.

4) >>> personal sacrifices you are willing to make

This strikes as very hollow. The very last thing anyone thinks about is personal sacrifices, when thinking about working at meta. Unless you are a paladin and you think selling people ads or getting them addicted to apps is some sort of an unholy dark spell, what's there not to like?

5) >>> fresh out of college came to expect six figures, free food, gym memberships, laundry services, and company stock that only went up. It seemed less like a job market and more like winning a particularly nerdy and privileged lottery. That’s not what it feels like anymore.

None of those things actually changed, except of course they expect you to do the work 24/7. Before it may have been 25/4. So the bar has been raised a little, yes, but the people working there still winners of "the nerdy and privileged lottery"

HDThoreaun• 2 months ago

Meta makes $60 billion profit a year. Theyve got a 5.33 billion dividend and do $25 billion of buybacks a year. So even after returning capital to shareholders theyre racking up $30 billion a year in cash flow. They also have minimal debt, less than one year of profits on top of a cash pile that could pay it off instantly. Mark could easily pay for AI capex without cutting workforce if he wanted to.

sdevonoes• 2 months ago

My company doesn’t give a damn about me either… and they don’t pay what meta pays. What’s the point? If you are an employee, 99% of the companies out there couldn’t care less about you.

sgt• 2 months ago

Recording employee's screens in order for an AI to determine whether you can replaced is some of the most dystopian stuff I've heard all year.

deepsquirrelnet• 2 months ago

Not that I’d want to work there given what they do, but every time I’ve been contacted by a recruiter there, it seems like it’s within a month of a mass layoff they’ve had… which is maybe just because they seem to have mass layoffs every quarter now.

They also seem to have adopted a no-remote hire policy and are in an extreme high CoL location. It’s a truly awful mix for trying to attract outside talent. I don’t know why they even bother.

xnx• 2 months ago

I thought this was going to be about the outsourced human content moderators who have to look at gore and porn for less than minimum wage.

You’ve been at Meta for more than a decade.

It seems to be about someone who probably makes >$200K/year and should be set for life with stock options.

ornornor• 2 months ago

Boohoo, too bad so sad. Facebook has been a psychopathic company hellbent on making the most money possible in the most unethical ways by influencing its users and bleeding them dry for their personal data.

Whoever chose to work for them in the last 15 years really made a conscious choice. They chose money over ethics and anything else. And don’t tell me about student loans, there are other companies hiring (well, at the time anyway) engineers that would let you make your payments comfortably.

mji• 2 months ago

A decade ago, it was a real flex in San Francisco to say you worked at Meta, Google, Apple, Tesla ... That’s not what it feels like anymore.

Sure but that's just because there are now different companies (AI labs) on this list instead

ifyoubuildit• 2 months ago

I do wonder if either the interviewer or interviewee are aware how insane this must sound to people with regular jobs. They did mention something about feeling privileged, but it feels like they don't necessarily understand what that actually means.

Realistically, you hit the lottery and had (still have?) it better than most. I'm not at faang, but I do pretty well at a tech company myself, and I've never thought of any of it as permanent, and I arrange my life accordingly.

eudamoniac• 2 months ago

Yet another "I arranged my entire life around the assumption I would have this same job and salary for literally ever and now I might not, oh no!" story. I don't get it. These people make a gorillion dollars. If they don't have multiple years of expenses saved up rather quickly, it's a skill issue.

A Meta employee gets real about the horror of working there

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