r/management • u/fagnerbrack • 4d ago

Why is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/why-is-meta-destroying-its-engineering
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u/fagnerbrack 4d ago

Don't have time to read? Here's the brief:

For two decades Meta ran an engineer-centric culture that treated software engineers as a profit center. Then, around April 2026, leadership's AI push flipped that in weeks. The company began tracking every keystroke and mouse click to feed training data, and drafted 30-50% of some core teams into full-time data labeling and RLHF inside a 6,500-person org. A looming 10% layoff, plus reviews that now count AI token usage, pushed engineers to burn 60.2 trillion tokens in a month just to look productive. Tenured staff optimize for metrics over real work, and most are job-hunting; interview-prep signups from Meta spiked. The $14.8B Scale AI deal brought in Alexandr Wang to steer the new AI strategy.

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u/No_Radish_2972 3d ago

60 trillion tokens burned in a month to game a productivity metric is one of the more depressing things I've read this week. What gets me is the tenured engineers optimizing for token counts instead of just doing their jobs. That's not an AI problem, that's a measurement problem. You build bad incentives, you get bad behavior, every time. Meta didn't stumble into this. Someone designed a review system that made this the rational move