Morale At Meta Is At An All-Time Low, And Workers Are Revolting

What is going on at Meta? [concerned music]

There's a lot of news coming out

of the company at the moment,

and almost none of it is good.

At WIRED, we've been reporting on Meta's mass layoffs,

the company's restructuring

and capital expenditures around AI,

and how some employees are essentially revolting against

all of these changes.

Meta's stock is also down 18% over the past 12 months.

But the bigger issue that CEO Mark Zuckerberg is facing

is essentially how much the internal culture

has taken a hit.

And this goes a lot deeper than just one speed run

through a series of management blunders.

So what is going on?

Back in March, Meta began moving thousands of engineers

and product managers to a new applied AI division

where they were given tasks that were basically aimed

at training the company's generative AI models.

And if folks resisted the reassignment,

they risked getting laid off.

And a lot of Meta workers hated this.

They were given menial tasks to do.

Even the most skilled engineers,

they were put into AI training sessions,

and some of them began loudly protesting these changes

on company internal message boards,

and actually during the training sessions themselves.

Adding to the drama was the fact

that Meta had recently decided

to install tracking software on employees' computers

to track their activity

and to use that data, once again, for training AI.

And according to our sources,

employees really didn't like this,

which is a little bit ironic

considering how flippant Meta has historically been

about its users' privacy.

And then earlier this week we reported exclusively

on how Meta's Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth,

sent out a memo to the staff acknowledging that the rollout

and the communications around these new AI programs

had been quote unquote atrocious.

He vowed to be more transparent,

to make Meta a fun workplace again,

and even said that the company

would be reintroducing micro kitchens or snack stations.

Because snacks will fix this.

What this all signals is not just

that Meta's new applied AI program

and its restructuring was maybe poorly planned out,

but that even amongst the most technical workers

who would typically embrace AI,

AI is forcing a lot of really unsettling changes

in Silicon Valley.

Now, AI is posing such existential questions like,

Will I even have a job in the future?

Is it worth it to live in constant fear of layoffs?

What does it mean if I've basically become an AI lab rat?

that some workers seem to be saying,

I'm not going down without a fight.

If you work in Silicon Valley,

I'd love to hear more from you on this,

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go to WIRED.com and subscribe.