Early last year, Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, gave a clear message to his employees. “If you feel that way, you should resign,” he told employees who said they were being treated poorly. “You should consider working elsewhere,” he told another person who questioned the company’s controversial changes. He was looking to strengthen the company, which Meta has been working towards over the past few years. It was a lean, fast-paced, high-pressure organization that could no longer tolerate internal debate. “You can quit, or you can disagree and commit,” Bosworth said.
But in memos and meetings with employees this month, Bosworth sounded like a different person. He said morale was “probably one of the worst ever”, adding that the company had done a “terrible job” in its recent restructuring. “We have destroyed your trust that your specific expertise and contributions will be valued.”
From 2022 onwards, Meta has reinvented itself around the ruthless management strategies that helped define a new era in Silicon Valley. After brutal layoffs and many other unpopular decisions, executives pressed on, emboldened by record profits and apparently unaffected by building dissatisfaction. Bosworth’s comments last week were different, acknowledging that Meta’s leadership may finally be facing the cost of its actions.
Meta’s employees are at breaking point. UK employees are planning to form a trade union, accusing management of “cruel and short-sighted behavior”. More than 1,600 employees have signed a petition asking Meta to stop tracking employee keystrokes to improve its AI models. As Wired reported this month, the situation got so bad that one disgruntled employee hijacked a livestreamed meeting in a profanity-laced rant directed at executives. Another compared work in the new AI training unit to a forced labor camp. Some people are so depressed that they actually pray to be fired so they can at least retire with some severance.
Against this backdrop, Mr. Bosworth was one of several executives in recent weeks scrambling to do damage control. Chief product officer Chris Cox acknowledged “the madness at this company” that had created a “difficult” and “brutal” environment. CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted: “We made a mistake.”
“This is a classic example of chickens coming home to roost,” says Sandra Sucher, professor of management practice at Harvard Business School. “They almost systematically destroyed trust. They’re trying to find a way to dig themselves out of the hole they dug.”
The investigation began with the mass layoffs of 11,000 people at the end of 2022, and Zuckerberg at least offered an apology. The company then cut another 10,000 jobs in the spring of the following year, which Zuckerberg hailed as the “year of efficiency,” and another 3,600 in 2025 to weed out “poor performers,” effectively disrupting job searches for some employees (many of whom, it turns out, had good performance reviews). In March, news broke that the company was making further job cuts, but by not confirming the cuts for weeks and notifying those affected until May, everyone was sent into a nauseating two-month purgatory. In April, Meta announced amid the turmoil that it would start tracking employee keystrokes, fueling concerns that the company wanted to automate their work. And in May, it laid off 8,000 employees and redeployed another 7,000, many of them in menial jobs related to AI training. Mehta declined to comment for this story.
In a meeting with Instagram employees this month, Cox likened working there to “running a marathon in the middle of a hailstorm, your teammates changing places, and then we’re recording you.” He added: “I’m like, what the hell?”
Employees affected by the hailstorm must have felt justified in having management empathize with their situation. But certainly he and other executives at Meta knew that all of this would make employees unhappy, and yet they did it anyway. So why all of a sudden Meerkurupa?
Perhaps anger, frustration, and outright rebellion were sapping productivity. Alternatively, the particularly public nature of Meta’s dysfunction, along with increased news coverage, caused it to lose its reputation with investors. Or maybe executives have finally realized what has become obvious to everyone else: The meta is not going to work no matter what they do. The key to adopting this enthusiastic management style was to accelerate employee innovation and keep up with competitors like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in the all-encompassing battle over AI. On the contrary, the meta is falling further and further behind. The company delayed what would have been its flagship AI model last year and ultimately never released it, as engineers reportedly struggled to improve its functionality. This year, the company repeatedly delayed rolling out another model to developers.
This begs the question: Was the post-2022 meta a big mistake? Decades of management research suggests that fear and uncertainty are surefire ways to bleed out good employees, struggle to recruit new employees, and stifle the creative risk-taking that leads to meaningful breakthroughs.
“Hopefully we can rekindle the great culture that we were a part of,” Bosworth said. “It’s a society where people have the psychological safety to take risks and do the right thing over the long term.”
Sucher, who studies trust in organizations, said executives do the right thing by recognizing they were wrong. So are the small concessions they’ve made in recent weeks, like reducing the size of the teams managers oversee, scaling back keystroke monitoring programs and pledging to increase budgets for social events to give employees more time. Employees reassigned to AI training roles will also have the opportunity to select another role of their choice, the company announced internally this week.
But the real first step, Thatcher advises, is for Zuckerberg himself to issue a proper apology that actually includes the words “I’m sorry.” And most importantly, she says, Mr. Zuckerberg needs to make a credible promise that he won’t continue to make the same fundamental mistake of treating employees as if they are not worthy of respect and consideration. It means that workers understand that they won’t see their co-workers fired, submitted to surveillance, or transferred to unwanted assignments. Then, like magic, you’re back to doing your best work.
“It’s very difficult to turn the ship around these things,” she says. “That usually requires a new leader. I can’t imagine Mark Zuckerberg being a reliable spokesperson for change.”
Whether that ship actually turns around is a big question for the 70,000 or so people who remain in the meta. This is also important for other technology industries. We are now looking back at November 2022, when Meta became the first major technology company to implement mass layoffs, as the beginning of Silicon Valley’s zero-prisoners era. Will Meta executives’ recent comments signal a true course correction within and outside the company, or just a pause before returning to a more draconian approach?
There are some rays of hope. In recent months, both Google and Microsoft have opted to offer voluntary buyouts rather than mass layoffs, a more humane approach that could help maintain morale. Zuckerberg himself has promised a period of stability and refrained from making any more large-scale layoffs until at least the end of the year.
Aki Ito I’m Business Insider’s chief correspondent.
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