This really doesn't sound believable to me, but who knows with all the craziness going on. Software developers in the US are seriously expensive, using them for data labeling would be a waste of resources. And the percentage sounds very high, unless "core teams" is only a small subset of the total developer count.
Would it? It seems like they can spend a few months extracting intelligence and "taste" from their engineers then get years worth of it back from the AI.
scale ai's value prop was catching people like this
Soooo, yes it is a waste of resources ($$$). But this was the initial intention.
Ironically this vanishes when the tables are turned and we ask for things like better hardware or software. There are plenty of us here with stories of how much effort it took to convince employers that SSDs were worth it when they were new, small, and very expensive.
So if you have access to a large number of highly skilled people, and you really don't absolutely need them to do other things, why wouldn't you force data labeling tasks on them?
Facebook is also planning a 10% layoff, so this also works as encouragement for people to leave voluntarily.
(Before you downvote me, note that I'm not endorsing this or saying it's a good idea. I'm just saying that I believe it's true, because I can see how Facebook's leadership would think it's a good idea.)
basically a soft layoff
> Forced data labeling with 4,500+ engineers is to generate high-quality RLHF
I doubt that you get high quality from forced reassignments where the now-data labelers don’t actually want to do that kind of work.
It’s crazy to think that Meta leadership believed that it makes sense.
The frontier work is on labeling and training expert content, by experts. It's unglamorous work and almost certainly doesn't warrant FAANG pay, but neither did most of the work that most FAANG engineers were already doing. But it does require competent talent from the expert domain.
Like their peer companies, Meta is still sitting on a huge pool of vetted-as-competant workers from the hiring boom and expert AI training is the most ripe business opportunity in a fragile economy where pretty much every comparable opportunity has evaporated.
Zuck basically went to a town hall and explained to his employees that their remaining value to him is as training mules for his AI.
This is the fast track to being next in a round of layoffs. If your manager does not know you, they won’t vouch for you when it comes time to toss people out of the airlock. You are in a vulnerable position.
Don’t forget failed, mentally ill, manic rebrands that cost billions and go nowhere.
Oh, and enabling human traffickers.
Turned out he was schtupping the vp of the design company (his wife told the admin assistant during the divorce)
Yeah there's lots of ethics rules and stuff about it but we've seen how little the upper class cares about that
Whenever a big business deal goes down, I tend to assume someone's getting sex or money out of the deal
Frankly there's already just so much corruption that we know about and it seems unlikely we know about all of it or even most of it
Holy shit, talking about perverse incentives!
its unclear to me why they need their model to be the best at coding (maybe to build an internal technical moat?)
In the last few years, they've locked third-party apps out of publishing to Facebook Groups, closed down the bug ticket system, and gave every indication of having abandoned any efforts at improving the ecosystem.
Zuck only cares about features, or new features. He probably likes power too, but I'm less certain than that. To curry favour with Zuck all you need to do is make a new feature, ideally using AI/AR.
The problem is, zuckerberg trusts no-one, so he is surrounded by familiar faces that act as his inner court. The problem for meta and the rest of the world, is that most of them are utter brainless dicks.
Cox is utterly useless, he has the cognitive faculties of a flea. the rest of the product council has been ruthless bred for agreeing, rather than making good product decisions. Worse still they are either wilfully blind or just blind to the second order effects that their actions take.
Boz, in person is nice. Boz as a leader is a vapid, lacks insight fails to provide actual direction and lets his ego bruise too often. He was 2 years to late to NFTs, Regularly picked fights with juniors in the comments.
The other elephant in the room is the monetisation department. They are basically the drivers of most of the problems in facebook.
Notification fatigue? yeah probably them,
AI slop to boomers? deffo
Rage bait? yup
Fraud? totally profitable.
There was a concerted effort by engineers to try and make meta better (see sophie Zhang), however as time moved forward those that cared were diluted by those that were just there. They recruited far too agressivly in 2020. we had too many people then, but "there was a plan"
They started firing people in 2022, and never stopped. It was clear that Zuck wanted to be a big man, and doesn't really understand how to run his company (Sandberg is a terrible person, but a good leader, even though shes a monumental hypocrite. He saw her as she is, and assumed thats what the rest of the world saw.)
So there’s really not a lot of growth areas for them? Their biggest growth seems to have been acquisitions, not new features.
Maybe data labeling is like RTO - an intentional way to force attrition.
That's the thing right
So I was research so both metaverse and AI adjacent. FAIR was industry leading, just not in the sexy field of LLM. FAIR was passed around like a joint at a student house, finally landing under Cox for "product". But FAIR is a research org, so it was a bad fit, run by an even worse leader. (why can't you deliver a new industry leading LLM in 5 weeks? or some other stupid shit)
The metaverse flopped because there was no clear leadership over features/user experience/hardware. Hardware has a 2-4 year lead time. This means that you need to plan your features 5 years in advance. The average horizon for any software feature in oculus was like 4 months.
Because of the huge influx of non game/graphics/hardware engineers the same mistake about "oh lets build a x but for oculus" happened every year. When I left they had contracted a company to re-make unity but for horizon. At the same time they were also making a blender clone, but in react or some stupid shitty idea.
At no point was there a comprehensive plan for what the UX should be like. there were lots of plans that people made, posted about, got many likes. Lots of redesigns of the button, new social features, avatars etc.
Carmak kept on banging on about time to fun, but he never managed to actually make that work. So a social company with a massive social graph, has a product where you can't easily join your friends in a game. (that might of changed, they revoked all my games when I left so I haven't logged in.)
But your point right, in all the years threads is the only new product they have launched, and that only happend by accident.
Meta's SOP is basically have an idea that gets zuck hard, do a small PoC, it shows promise, scale the team from 10 to 3000, and don't deliver anything.
The labelling I don't think is an attrition thing, I think its doing standard facebook shit, throw people at the problem, without thinking about how that would work
But what I don’t understand is how screen recording / keyboard recording is useful AI training data?
It seems like a lot cost and a lot of pissing off people for something that is actually not very valuable.
Obviously this isn't as true for things where it truly matters - encryption software, financial software, etc. - but it's amazing how little engineering excellent has to do with a company's success.
That's because your engineering career coincides with a race to the bottom, where advertising-saturated, FOMO-afflicted consumers demonstrated a preference for accumulating as many cheap/free/subsidized things that they could over a few durable, valuable things that genuinely benefit them.
It wasn't always that way, and if the economy does encounter a strong correction, it could very well change again.
See also Twitter when Ol' Musky rolled in.
You undoubtedly had other options, yet you chose to work for one of the most well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organizations on the planet. Former employees will deflect and make the comparison to United Fruit workers, despite the obvious difference in employee-optionality and influence.
You made your bed. I hope your organization gets destroyed. I hope you reflect on the damage you've caused the world.
Look at their big growth areas. They acquired instagram and WhatsApp. Threads seems successful(?) but is an extension of instagram.
Mostly they’ve just gotten better at weaponizing rage bait. Which I’d argue, long term, will be a losing strategy.
If this were a healthy culture, with all the people working there, Zuck would have promoted far more interesting internal experiment to full blown products. That just doesn’t seem to happen there.
The advertisements within Instagram for Threads almost always seem to be fairly thinly disguised engagement & rage bait. Every time it gets me, I feel an increasing desire to move away from the whole ecosystem.
I don't understand this either, there are so many clearly advantageous ideas and experiments to be be carried out, that can make discussions better, thinking clearer and help people actually connect. But instead they're only thinking about how to optimize the ad-machine in the end, so depressing to see.
I believe that the cultures that were developed outside of Meta are used to launder the image that meta as a whole has a good engineering culture.
They had always sung the praises of Instagram's culture but said they didn't recognize the company that they came back to. Literally night and day between the best and worst place they'd worked.
Almost every company is all in on AI so what makes Meta particularly bad?
Why would you ever do such a thing on a device controlled by your employer?
I guess there's a whole generation of devs who don't remember the Microsoft antitrust trial, and haven't learned the "anything you do at work may come out in discovery" lesson.
Do they go to Apple Store and login it to their personal account on the showcase iphone and yell at the genius employees?
Do NOT have an expectation that this is “normal” income. You’ll probably end up destroying your integrity or doing tons of BS work just to do anything to maintain that level of income.
Expect the norm to be a startup, non tech company, or some other non FAANG big tech corp.
Also the genocides.
I thought that was YouTube's business model.
Now if you'll excuse me I need to purchase some phony dick pills and diabetes snake oil to go with my fake NASA-designed air conditioner.
Problem? This is the best news I've heard in a while.
There's always the option of getting rid of all the engineers working on new stuff, and having a small support staff. Often times, customers would even prefer that.
Zuck IMO doesn’t have the halo Musk has where there’s results mixed in with the BS. And Meta doesn’t seem to have a good track record of developing new products.
Is a rage bait machine currently at / near its peak of usage still an interesting investment in 2026?
edit: sorry but if you purposely to chose to work at Meta after 2016 you clearly have zero morals and are fine with working at a company that not only willingly exacerbated a genocide but knowingly profited off of it too.
These workers can't be condemned enough, some of these devs should be in prison too.
You really think if they didn't work there, someone else wouldn't?
You really think them and only them are the people capable of doing whatever technical things are causing the problems you perceive?
How well a job is compensated on average very much depends on how willing and able the average person is to do it.
You're a TVC in the kitchen at Meta? All you do is give girls depression?
You work at a business that buys ads on Meta? Is all you do is give girls depression? Even if you work in a non-profit branch specifically to do out-reach for kids or something??
How far separated from Meta do you have to be to not be reduced to doing nothing but giving girls depression?
EDIT: my bad, I read you wrong and didn't realize you didn't bring up the whole tenage girl thing. Sorry for that.
I'm directly addressing OP's original comment that "all anyone at Meta does is give girls depression."
It's almost as if it's not that reductive... even though you just made the same reduction...
Want to answer the actual question?
What does that have to do with any person's individual morals?
It's getting to the point where selling my soul to the highest bidder is going to be absolutely required for any big tech job going forward.
Can you expand on this? Aren't there plenty of "not-amazing-but-definitely-not-evil" organization out there which need talented engineers?
I won't color any large entity uniformly bad at all times and aspects.
People created PyTorch and React, they happen to be working at Meta at the time.
Maybe it's unlikely they'd create those working elsewhere, but I think it's much more unlikely that someone else at Meta would have created the same thing without those people there.
One day, when there is no job for you, you will look back on this moment and chide your past self.
There is no organisation that has their hands clean. Not even the one you work for.
Like, you can go be a middle school teacher and probably be fine if you stuffed the sack while the stuffing was good.
At one end of the spectrum you have very talented, smart engineers who could easily get a job anywhere, devoting their lives to targeting ads, surveillance, etc. At the other end is, let’s say, the cleaning staff. Meta would suffer if either group outright refused to work for them, but their mission is affected more by the engineers, they are harder to replace, they have many more options in terms of alternative employment, and they have greater knowledge of the impact of the business. Thus, they bear (much) higher relative moral responsibility. Compare to the cleaning staff, who, because of their relative lack of standing, agency (they likely work for some other company that Meta contracts with), or other options, bear negligible moral responsibility, even though their absence would likely make Meta’s offices uninhabitable.
Everyone working there is somewhere on that spectrum. They can make their own judgements about the degree to which they bear any moral culpability, but it’s not unfair to say that someone working on open source at Facebook still contributes to the overall mission by oss-washing facebook’s reputation, promulgating the brand into the engineering consciousness, etc., even if they are not directly contributing to giving girls depression.
Thanks for sharing the paper. Going to read it tonight, the abstract is very interesting.
simonw•1h ago