Meta Exec Admits Zuckerberg Has Crushed Workers' Spirits
futurism.com
Meta's chief technical officer recently admitted that workplace morale is "probably one of the worst it's ever been."
  • scarabic@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    2 hours ago

    In my experience, no one working for Meta does so for “spirit.” There are two kinds of people there:

    1. Extremely smart and business savvy, there to make lots of money and pretty good at doing so. These people tend to be a little older and more cutthroat. They don’t have “spirit” to be crushed. They will stay or leave on financials alone.

    2. Younger crowd, largely straight from college, working across product, engineering, and other operations roles. These folks don’t have “spirit” per se - they have operated on large paychecks and a high energy work environment full of the brainy types they roomed with at college. A posh office full of free amenities is half of what kept them going and the other half was youthful hormones fueled by each other and a general sense of being on top of the world by virtue of working there.

    THAT last part has been crushed, but it is not what I would call “spirit” or “soul.” More like a collective delusion that fed on its own momentum. Like anything else so divorced from reality, it was always going to crash. It’s amazing they kept it going as long as they did.

  • ddplf@szmer.infoEnglish
    2·
    53 minutes ago

    It used to be a pretty big deal to land a job at Meta, Google, Amazon, Microsoft or Netflix as a dev. If you were fresh out of college and saw your friend update their linkedin to show that they’ve been employed in one of these companies, it fucking meant something.

    I don’t know if it’s just my perception, but when I see a guy I know working for Big Tech, it’s just fucking disgusting. Being a part of a machine that’s actively contributing to the literal downfall of society as we know it, pushing us into the depths of technofeudalism and corporate fascism.

  • bstix@feddit.dkEnglish
    12·
    6 hours ago

    If I was Mark, I would require all company meetings to happen in the Metaverse, so I could change all their sad faces to happy smily faces.

    Why have sad conversations when you can have “hey boss I think you suck and I quit! 😄😄”

  • HeartyOfGlass@piefed.socialEnglish
    66·
    11 hours ago

    In an effort to lift everybody’s spirits, Zuckerberg offered to host a company-wide hackathon an attempt at a lighthearted diversion that landed with a thud among employees.

    lmao “Hey, you guys wanna work more, but ‘for fun’?”

    • halloween_spookster@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      58 minutes ago

      Good hackathons don’t mean more work. They should carve out time for people to participate. However if the systems those employees are maintaining need constant work then you can’t carve out time for a hackathon because the systems will go down otherwise. It sounds like Facebook is doing the latter. A one off event will also not improve morale, just like a pizza party won’t on its own.

    • scarabic@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 hour ago

      Hackathons are not working more. They’re supposed to be a liberal period to work on whatever seems interesting to the workers. In Meta’s early days, they were a big part of their culture and Zuck in particular fed on them.

      I don’t expect everyone to know anything about Silicon Valley hackathons, but no, they’re not just “more work.” However when people are already crushed by what’s going on at work, they don’t have a lot of creative energy just looking for an outlet.

    • Windex007@lemmy.worldEnglish
      21·
      4 hours ago

      I used to work for a company that did them. Your usual deliverables would be paused, including meetings.

      It wasn’t “more”. They were great. Most of our internal tooling was prototyped that way, and that tooling was super awesome… because it directly solved the real issues we had in our processes.

      My current company is “you can during the designated hackathon events, but you still have to do everything you usually would”. Which is absurd because it means that we don’t always have the option to work late for free.

  • AbsolutelyNotAVelociraptor@piefed.socialEnglish
    49·
    11 hours ago

    if you are still working at meta, you are there for the money, even tho it’s one of the most harmful companies in the world for our society and our planet. If your morale is low because some coworkers got fired, well, fuck you. You are part of the cancer of this planet, so if you all get laid off and meta is burned to the ground, I won’t be happier.

    • proudblond@lemmy.world
      English
      3·
      2 hours ago

      I bet there are at least some working there who have their heads in the sand about how bad a company it is and just want to believe they’re good people doing good work. I don’t think many people want to admit to themselves that they’re just doing something for money. But yeah… the proverbial rock they live under must be mountain-sized.

  • Zwuzelmaus@feddit.orgEnglish
    36·
    13 hours ago

    a buffet of HR-solutionism like resilience training, pulse surveys, and the dreaded team-building exercise.

    Well said, and soo true! 😅

        • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
          9·
          9 hours ago

          Thanks!

          A big reason for me is that people can tell who the source is more easily, instead of seeing a generic Yahoo link. If someone is blocking or flagging a particular domain through their app / front-end, then it won’t work for a yahoo link.

          Also while I don’t think Yahoo is doing something illegal, my gut says that these articles are harming the smaller news orgs. When Yahoo/MSN publishes the full article, the user likely doesn’t notice who the actual news org is, likely doesn’t go to the real news orgs website, the news org has a harder time building a brand / reputation, and over time they might become even more dependent on Yahoo to stay afloat. A lot of the time when I look up a story, the yahoo page ranks above the actual original source, and that feels wrong to me