With the changes, Meta introduced a “village approach” to managing people, according to an internal announcement from one unit. Job performance ratings and promotions would be decided by high-level unit heads, or “Org Leads,” supported by human-resources personnel and unspecified “AI systems,” the post said. Each unit head would oversee between 30 and 50 people, while “Pod Leads” would steer small pods day-to-day, but have no formal management authority, the sources and announcements said.
One Meta staffer assigned to manage a pod expressed confusion about the new setup on an internal company message board, according to a copy of the post. “I’m not going through manager training, and I’m not getting access to ratings & manager tools,” the person wrote.
Around the same time, Meta also launched a new human resources tool to identify “Irreplaceable Talent,” according to an internal document seen by Reuters. The document referred to a hypothetical “10X Performer” — a nod to the decades-old Silicon Valley archetype of an engineer who can do the work of 10 people. The term is back in vogue now, as many AI devotees believe the technology will enable extremely talented individuals to perform the work of entire teams. According to two people familiar with the matter, Meta intended to spend some of its savings from layoffs on giant pay packages to attract and retain such talent, especially AI engineering rock stars.
On March 13, before many leaders at the vice-president level had even been briefed on Project OT, Reuters reported that Meta was planning layoffs that could affect 20% or more of its workforce. It wouldn’t have been the first culling on that scale: Between late 2022 and early 2023, Meta slashed around 25% of its staff.
Still, the report caused alarm. Many rank-and-file employees were rattled. And they weren’t yet supposed to know about the cuts, annoying Zuckerberg and leaving executives unprepared for the backlash, according to a person familiar with the matter. A Meta spokesperson at the time called the story “speculative reporting about theoretical approaches.”
Internally, high-level executives hunkered down. They opted not to discuss the article with the rank-and-file and quietly dismissed it to senior managers, instructing them to tell their teams they should expect roles to “evolve” as a result of AI, according to a talking-points document seen by Reuters.
In April, Reuters published more details: Meta was set to cut about 10% of its workforce in a first wave of layoffs on May 20 and was aiming to shed more staff in the second half of the year. Meta soon confirmed the 10% reduction plan to staff, and Zuckerberg later told employees the cuts were due to heavy capital expenditures.
Executives had started moving ahead with other aspects of the plan. Some engineers, for example, were reassigned to a new Applied AI Engineering unit tasked with creating software-engineering puzzles to be used as training data to improve the coding skills of Meta’s AI models. Many staffers derided the work as rote and boring in internal posts seen by Reuters.
Between the reassignments and the job cuts, headcount in some engineering units dropped as much as 30% by the end of May, according to one document and people familiar with the planning.
Reuters also reported in April that Meta had mandated that tracking software be installed on U.S. employees’ devices to capture their keystrokes and mouse clicks to teach its AI agents to replicate how humans interact with computers. Believing they might be training their own AI replacements, and irate over the lack of detail about the layoffs, many employees flooded Meta’s in-house communications network — called Workplace — with angry screeds and gallows humor.
Staffers replied to executives’ internal posts with pictures of elephants, symbolizing that layoffs were the elephant in the room, according to examples seen by Reuters. Some employees directly clashed with Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, who oversaw the AI transformation and was defending it in posted comments. One person trolled Zuckerberg, sarcastically likening his internal announcement of an AI initiative for small businesses to Prometheus, the figure from Greek mythology, giving fire to humanity.
Staff morale sank. Meta’s internal measure of employee sentiment dropped from 74% favorable to 55% favorable, according to the company’s half-year Pulse survey. Labor organizing efforts gained momentum.
Amid the rebellion, other internal data indicated that the tech at the heart of the plan wasn’t delivering. Employees’ use of AI had resulted in a vast increase in the code they generated, but with questionable impact on productivity, according to internal posts seen by Reuters. For instance, code changes made to the internal software platforms and infrastructure employees use on the job were up 220% year-over-year, according to a post by Bosworth in early June. But changes that led to new or upgraded features reaching Meta users were only up 36%.
As early as March, infrastructure teams were also warning of “reliability warning signs” caused by the AI coding surge, according to an internal post. Another post, in April, said that unchecked AI agents were performing “large-scale, disruptive actions that humans are unlikely to execute.” The result: Major technical and security incidents, such as service disruptions and possible data leaks, spiked 40% from the previous year, with the time staffers had to spend “firefighting” them up 70%, according to the internal posts.
The public saw a glimpse of the problem in early June after hackers exploited Meta’s new AI-powered customer support bot to gain access to high-profile Instagram accounts, including one for the dormant Obama White House page.
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