‘Why Is Meta Destroying Its Engineering Organization?’
Meta's engineering culture is deteriorating under Mark Zuckerberg and Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, who have introduced keyboard tracking, reassignments to data labeling, and AI-centric performance metrics. Critics argue this incentivizes performative AI use, drives away experienced engineers, and contributed to a major Instagram hijacking incident caused by AI-written and AI-reviewed code.
Background
- **Meta** (Facebook's parent) has long had an intense engineering culture centered on "PSC" (Performance Summary Cycle) — a rigid system where employees are ranked against each other and the lowest performers are pushed out.
- **Scale AI**, led by CEO **Alexandr Wang**, is a data-labeling company that provides human-curated training data for AI. Meta bought a 49% stake in June 2025 for $14.8B; Wang now effectively runs Meta's AI strategy.
- Per the article, Meta now tracks engineers' keyboard/mouse clicks, reassigns many to data-labeling (training AI instead of writing product code), pre-announced 10% layoffs despite record profits, and measures AI token usage in performance reviews — creating perverse incentives to use AI even when it causes outages.
- The result: engineers optimize for metrics, senior engineers are leaving, and a recent Instagram account hijacking (where Meta AI could be tricked into handing over accounts) stemmed from AI writing and reviewing its own code without proper human oversight.