This is exactly why Zuck feels he needs a Sam Altman type in charge. They have the labs, the researchers, the GPUs, and unlimited cash to burn. Yet it takes more than all that to drive outcomes. Llama 4 is fine but still a distant 6th or 7th in the AI race. Everyone is too busy playing corporate politics. They need an outsider to come shake things up.
The corporate politics at Meta is the result of Zuck's own decisions. Even in big tech, Meta is (along with Amazon) rather famous for its highly political and backstabby culture.
This is because these two companies have extremely performance-review oriented cultures where results need to be proven every quarter or you're grounds for laying off.
Labs known for being innovative all share the same trait of allowing researchers to go YEARS without high impact results. But both Meta and Scale are known for being grind shops.
Can't upvote this enough. From what I saw at Meta, the idea of a high performance culture (which I generally don't have an issue with) found its ultimate form and became performance review culture. Almost every decision made filtered through "but how will this help me during the next review". If you ever wonder about some of the moves you see at Meta, perf review optimization was probably at the root of it.
I may or may not have worked there for 4 years and may or may not be able to confirm that Meta is one of the most poorly run companies I've ever seen.
They are, at best, 25-33% efficient at taking talent+money and turning it into something. Their PSC process creates the wrong incentives, they either ignore or punish the type of behavior you actually want, and talented people either leave (especially after their cliff) or are turned into mediocre performers by Meta's awful culture.
Beyond that, the leaders at Facebook are deeply unlikeable, well beyond the leaders at Google, which is not a low bar. I know more people who reflexively ignore Facebook recruiters than who ignore recruiters from any other company. With this announcement, they have found a way to make that problem even worse.
Interesting that "high-impact" on the one hand, and innovative/successful in the marketplace on the other, should be at odds at Meta. Makes one wonder how they measure impact.
It doesn't matter much how they measure if it's empirical. Once they say the scoring system, all the work that scores well gets done, and the work that resists measurement does not get done.
The obvious example was writing eng docs. It was probably the single most helpful things you could do with your time, but there was no way to get credit because we couldn't say exactly how much time your docs might have saved others (the quantifiable impact from your work). That meant that we only ever developed a greater and greater unfilled need for docs, but it only ever got riskier and riskier to your career to try to dive into that work.
People were split on how to handle this. Some said "do the work that most needs doing and the perf review system will work it out long term." Other said, "just play the perf game to win."
I listened to the first group because I'm what you call a "believer." In a tech role I think my responsibility is primarily to users. I was let go (escorted off campus) after bottoming out a stack ranking during a half in which I did a lot of great work for the company that half (I think) but utterly failed to get a good score by the rules of the perf game (specifically I missed the deadline to land a very large PR and so most of my work for the half failed to make the key criteria for perf review: it had to be *landed* impact)
I think I took it graciously, but also I will never think of these companies as a home or a family again.
