Meta is Increasing the Snack Budget After Staff Morale Plummets
Meta is increasing snacks and travel funds after layoffs and AI reassignments left morale at one of its engineering units near a 20-year low.
- In a Friday memo, CEO Mark Zuckerberg conceded the AI restructuring caused "distress," promising no further company-wide layoffs for 2026 and capping manager-to-report ratios that had ballooned toward 50-to-one.
- CTO Andrew Bosworth acknowledged morale is near the worst he has seen in 20 years after Meta reassigned at least 6,500 staff to its new Applied AI division, a shift he described as "atrocious."
- Bosworth is boosting budgets for team travel, events, and snacks to "rekindle the best of the culture," following an internal call earlier this month where he admitted the "vibes are off" and compared morale to the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
- Involuntarily reassigned workers now call themselves "draftees," performing "soul-crushing" data-labeling tasks rather than core engineering. Meta staff recently exhausted 60.2 trillion AI tokens in 30 days, underscoring resource intensity.
- Despite recording $56.3bn in first-quarter revenue, Meta's stock has fallen around 18 per cent over the past year. Analysts warn that sacrificing engineering culture for a $14.3bn stake in Scale AI could impact long-term stability.
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