Meta CTO Tells Employees Scheduling Increased Staffing Is Causing ‘Continuous’ Slowness, Including Meetings That Take A Month
Some senior Meta executives will continue to believe that the results achieved are not commensurate with the size of the company. Shortly before Christmas, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth reportedly sent an email to Reality Labs’ 18,000 employees, complaining that the company was solving many problems simply by “adding staff.” Bosworth noted that higher headcount typically means higher costs and will seek a “cultural reset.” According to Bosworth, overhead slows things down.
Meta is one of the tech giants that overestimated the boom caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, which led them to drastically increase their workforce during this period. However, as things began to normalize, the growth seen during the pandemic slowed and businesses faced heavy burdens and a huge drop in revenue. Meta had to implement a layoff policy like Google and Salesforce. Together, they have cut tens of thousands of jobs over the past year.
Meta alone recently cut nearly 11,000 jobs to combat the macroeconomic downturn, but recent developments suggest that more layoffs could be made this year. In his weekly “Command Line” newsletter, The Verge editor Alex Heath discussed the internal storage he received from Meta’s CTO. In the memo, Bosworth complains about the company’s culture of solving internal problems primarily based on hiring more employees. To put an end to this, he wants to reset the internal culture.
The memo is said to have been addressed to 18,000 employees of Reality Labs, the company’s Meta division that works on metaverse and virtual reality projects. We solved many problems by adding staff. But adding employees also adds additional costs. Plus, what’s happening slows things down,” Bosworth wrote. Meta’s CTO believes the company’s bloated lineup is also contributing to programming delays, and says the future could get even more complicated if things continue like this. For Bosworth, the current situation is simply intolerable.
Every week I see articles with over 100 editors. A meeting with over 50 people that took a month to plan. Sometimes there is even a “pre-meeting” with its own document. I think that the current situation is intolerable.” Bosworth also reportedly suggested an overhaul of Meta’s performance management system in the memo. He believes that the focus should be less on rewarding “absolute impact” and more on return on investment. This, he said, would reward workers who “do more with less and avoid overhead altogether.”
Bosworth also gave an interview in which he commented on Meta’s accusations of high levels of investment and the group’s money-burning. According to him, it would be irresponsible to focus 80% of Meta’s investment on the core social media business, as in the past, rather than future work. I think this is an abuse of things. In this case, you are taking the wrong side of the innovation dilemma. However, Meta is constantly changing its investment strategy,” Bosworth said in an interview.
When asked about the meta’s struggles with the company’s meta platform, Horizon Worlds, he said the platform isn’t going away in 2022, even if it doesn’t grow as much as expected. From Reality Labs, Horizon is what we’re going to continue to do because it’s a social app that we can build on what we offer people across all platforms. Recall that Horizon Worlds was heavily criticized last year; the platform has also been criticized by Meta’s own employees.
On the departure of John Carmack, Meta’s former chief executive, last December, Bosworth said it was a real loss for the company. There’s a lot of things that I really believe in, I think John believes in, but I thought we shouldn’t do it yet, we should wait, we should do it in a different order, something different, Bosworth said. Carmack, one of the most respected figures in the virtual reality industry, resigned after saying he was unhappy with Meta’s inefficiency and slowness within the company.
Source: Internal mmo from Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth
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See also
Meta has announced 11,000 job cuts as part of managing the macroeconomic slowdown, following in the footsteps of other big tech companies.
John Carmack, one of the most respected names in the VR and video game industry thanks to Doom and Quake, has resigned as a CTO consultant at Meta / Facebook, among other things.
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John Carmack is leaving his role as CTO at Facebook’s Oculus to work on general artificial intelligence
