- Lack of leadership accountability & transparency: Between 2022-2023, the company has had 4 major rounds of layoffs, plunging revenues and profits, product misses and plummeting morale. During this time period, Mark gave nearly all of his direct reports glowing performance reviews - stating that they were either meeting or “exceeding” all of his expectations (this is a fact reported in the 10K company filing). When pressed about this by the employees during a Q&A, he attempted to defend his evaluation and claimed “leadership performance does not always need to match company performance.” This is the best way to sum up Mark and it trickles down from his reports to the rest of the company. The only people that get impacted by poor strategic decisions are middle mgmt and junior employees. Leadership is always exempt. — Lack of diversity in leadership: Mark continues to operate a fiefdom, where he has now surrounded himself by his old pals and "yes" men. There are only 2 "senior" women leaders left: CFO (recently promoted protege) and CHO. Both are sidelined and essentially talking pieces. Neither has taken any responsibility for the layoffs and simple mumble talking points during weekly Q&As. Neither is truly supported as a thought leader in the company. The rest of the leadership team are his cronies, who have been around for 15+ years. 5 top female product leaders and over 6 top female commercial leaders (VP & up) have exited in just the last 2 years. I left after 6.5 years and was 93% more tenured than the rest of the company. - “Move fast is OVER”: Entrenched and unwieldy admin/hierarchy required to ship product has escalated over the past 5 years and Meta has evolved to become a truly complex organisation that requires 15+ reviews of a product just to get it over the line. The Product Manager role has devolved to become a paper and review pusher, spending endless hours explaining products to program managers, lawyers and policy people who often don’t understand the fundamentals of technology, let alone customer needs. - Sexism rampant - especially during performance evaluations: I am a female product leader and when I took my legal parental leave (I am based in the UK and took the 1 year that is legally permitted to all UK citizens), my American manager told me “so you’re basically quitting.” Then when I returned, he demoted me and despite all my efforts to prove my performance at my previous level, refused to promote me, claiming he needed to see me performing at that level longer (mind you - my performance was so undoubtedly strong, that I received a “Greatly Exceeds All Expectations,” the 2nd highest at the company but still was not promoted). “Metamates” or Meta speaking heads will claim performance reviews are fair or rigorous but they certainly are not, and I have been impacted, and I have seen many others, especially minorities be impacted. Minorities are often asked to demonstrate strong performance for much longer periods of time (ex: 1-2 years) vs. white male peers who can often be promoted in 3-6mos for “business needs.” - Constant reorgs: Sure, fast growing companies should have reorgs more frequently, and I have worked in start-ups and several faster big tech rivals and accept reorgs as a norm. However - reorgs at Meta have a life of their own - they are a technique to move around management, create a constant environment of chaos and stress to induce people to leave or force burnout. One partner team I worked with reorged 4 times in one year. None of them even knew what their team was called or did anymore, and we all referred to their old team name anyway.
