Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective [View all]

[usonian]

https://eshumarneedi.com/2026/07/03/zuckerberg-admits-metas-layoffs-were.html
At a recent Meta town hall,

In retrospect, he said, the “trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected,” and ​that the company’s bets on the new structure “haven’t come to fruition yet.” Zuckerberg was referring to AI agents, automated systems that can ​execute tasks on behalf of a user.

The self-created tragedy of Meta is that the company is loath to invent new products. Instead, Meta’s management more or less relies on “vibes” to govern its decisions, and those vibes are often either wrong or far too late. The most pertinent example of the former is the ill-fated metaverse, which was developed solely on the (unbelievable) whim that the pandemic would last forever — or at least far longer than it actually did — and people would become accustomed to replacing in-person interaction with virtual reality. It was precisely at this moment, roughly around mid-2020, that Meta (then Facebook) disintegrated from a social media company into a Ship of Theseus that still technically operated its core social platforms but fundamentally was distracted by a red herring. Vibes-based management.

As I wrote in my now infamous “Meta-stasizing Cancer of Indirection” piece, Zuckerberg did not learn from this disastrous failure as the artificial intelligence boom kicked off in 2023. Long story short: Zuckerberg threw his company into turmoil because he was too late to identify that the metaverse was an abysmal failure. By the time he did, the AI boom was already in full swing, and Meta was thoroughly left out. This strategic failure, coupled with Zuckerberg’s arguably incompetent management style, left employees either out of employment, directionless, or both. It is just impossible to run a company on a whim — the metaverse was a distraction, and so was AI because Meta was far too late and improperly organized. Vibes-based management.

Zuckerberg yet again plunged his company into chaos after the success of Claude Code in December 2025. Knowing the company was behind in developing AI products after observing the rise of agentic coding, Zuckerberg effectively put Alexandr Wang, the chief of Meta’s AI division, in charge of the entire company. The only thing Wang did was wrongly determine that all human programmers were a waste of time and money and that it would be better to fire them and spend the freed-up cash on talented AI engineers who would unwittingly develop their own replacements. So that’s exactly what Zuckerberg did, per Wang’s hunch: he fired thousands of employees, put AI in charge of content moderation, and mandated that the remaining Meta workers install spyware that would track their computer use to train an agent that could take their job. Vibes-based management.

I believe that the spyware mandate was withdrawn.