Why is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

For two decades, Meta had a unique, high-performance engineering org; right up until around April of this year. For the first 20 years of the company’s existence, it had a “move-fast-and-break-things” culture, and in the early 2020s this shifted to a “move-fast-with-stable-infra” one. Engineers I know at the company were empowered to do good work, focus on impact, and to balance business interests with solid engineering.

But in the past few weeks, all that has changed, as if the leadership has been following detailed blueprints on how to demolish a proven, successful engineering culture in the most ruthlessly efficient way possible.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been sharing how bad things are inside the social media company for engineers in one of Silicon Valley’s most prestigious workplaces. In this article, we walk through what’s happened, and ask what’s going through the minds of leadership who are reducing software engineering there from the profit center that it was between 2004 until very recently, to the disdained cost center that it has become in just a few weeks.

We cover:

1. Meta’s pre-AI engineering culture

2. Investing in AI and pressing engineers to always use it

3. Core engineering folks feel treated like trash

4. Most embarrassing-ever outage

5. Internal mess

6. Self-inflicted wounds

7. Is it just Meta, or are other companies also acting irrationally?

1. Meta’s pre-AI engineering culture

I’d split Meta’s engineering culture into two eras: “move fast and break things”, and then “move fast with stable infra.”

“Move fast and break things”

In the 2010s, Facebook’s unconventional engineering culture had grown somewhat legendary in the tech industry, as the company went against conventional best practices and succeeded massively.

In 2012, when Facebook hit the billion-users landmark, the company produced a small physical book about its culture which was placed on employees’ desks. Presented with retro propaganda design, it was dubbed the “little red book”, co-opting the name of a famous volume of the thoughts of Chairman Mao, (1964).

At around 70 pages long, Facebook’s version codified its engineering culture: speed, fearlessness, taking ownership, and thinking outside of the box.

Back then, mantras in Facebook’s little red book were also in print across campus, and included:

• Move Fast and Break Things

• Done is Better Than Perfect

• Fail Harder

• What Would You Do If You Weren’t Afraid?

• Every Day Feels Like a Week

• The Wright Brothers Did Not Have Pilot Licenses

• The Foolish Wait

• Fortune Favors the Bold

There was genuine focus on building good products. Also from the book:

“Move fast with stable infra” culture

In 2022, I did what is one of the longest deepdives we’ve published on the topic of Meta’s engineering culture. By then, things had evolved, and much of any former recklessness was gone, replaced by the principle of moving fast, but with stable infra. Here’s how I described Meta’s engineering culture then:

“The culture is incredibly engineering-centric: much more than most of Big Tech. This might come from Mark Zuckerberg being an engineer himself, or because much of the innovation in the early days of Facebook came from engineers.

Focus on individual impact. Impact has been the bread and butter of the focus at Facebook. This is very true since the early days, and the focus on generating impact remains.