Meta Is Turning Its Best Engineers Into Data Labelers ↗

Gergely Orosz, for The Pragmatic Engineer:

Based on all I’ve learned, Meta’s engineering culture is dead because leadership has made it clear that engineering at the company is a cost center.

The detail that stays with me is the reassignment. A third to half of engineers, by Orosz’s reporting, pushed into labeling data for the models that are supposed to replace them. You build the thing that makes you redundant, on a deadline, while a keystroke tracker watches you do it. That is not a reorg. That is asking people to dig with the understanding that the hole is theirs.

None of this is a margin story. Meta is more profitable than it has ever been. The layoffs were announced into record earnings and dressed up as performance based, which is the part that should end the benefit of the doubt for good. When a company loses money and cuts, that is arithmetic. When a company prints money and cuts, then tells the people it cut that the problem was them, that is a choice about what kind of place it wants to be. Meta made the choice and reached for the most cowardly available framing.

I have spent years watching this company decide that the cost of its products is something other people pay. Teenagers paid it. Elections paid it. Newsrooms it strip mined for engagement paid it. The throughline was always that Meta could externalize the damage and keep the profit. Turning that machinery inward, onto the engineers who actually built the thing, is just the first time the target gets to write it up in public.

The part Zuckerberg seems not to grasp is that the engineering culture was the moat. Not the data centers, not the ad graph, the fact that strong people wanted to work there and stayed. Orosz quotes engineers who were the earliest AI adopters in the building, the exact people you would want betting on this, and they have soured. You cannot stack rank and keystroke track your way back into their good faith. Once they decide the company is a cost center too, they leave, and the only people who stay are the ones optimizing token counts to survive a review cycle.

Meta is finally aiming the harm at itself. I cannot pretend to be sorry.