interrupts

At the end of May, Meta made the biggest restructuring in its history: 8,000 employees were laid off and 7,000 were relocated to new departments. The internal leaks paint a rather unbearable atmosphere: the teams’ morale is at rock bottom and the unrest is widespread. In this context, an employee couldn’t take it anymore and exploded. what has happened. They tell it in Wired. During an internal presentation involving thousands of employees, one of them opened his microphone and said exactly what he thought, without filters. She declared that she felt like “the company’s bitch” and asked whoever had organized the call to tell a Meta executive that “he’s a piece of shit.” Details about who the angry executive or employee were have not emerged, but it is known that he was part of a new team called Applied AI, which some employees refer to as “the gulag.” Applied AI. Of the 7,000 people relocated, at least 6,500 have ended up here. Their job is to support the superintelligence department, where all the AI ​​galactics work that Zuckerberg signed last year. Wired has spoken with several of these employees who criticize that their work has become mechanical, uncreative and demoralizing. The majority of employees in this new department were engineers or product managers who were dedicated to software development, but now they have to create puzzles and problems for an AI to solve. Those chosen to enter this unit could not choose to go to another department: they either accepted the new position or they went out with the rest. In an internal memo, Zuckerberg himself tried to calm things down, suggesting that it was temporary: “The work is essential to the advancement of our models and allows very talented people to contribute to those efforts, while we create other positions in which they can contribute their bit at Meta in the coming months.” There is more. A month has passed since the layoffs were announced. A month in which employees did not know if they were going to end up on the street or not. As if that were not enough, at that time Meta made a very controversial decision: started monitoring everything employees did on their computers. The company installed a program that recorded clicks and took screenshots periodically, but not to control them (or not only for that), but so that its AI learns to perform everyday tasks. More than 1,600 employees signed a petition to have this program removed, but were only able to be allowed to pause data collection for 30 minutes. Something is something. The hackathon. The CEO of Meta is aware of the discontent among the staff, so he has had an idea to raise spirits: hold a hackathon next July that will be focused on “innovation in AI.” It seems that the only one in the mood for celebrations is Zuckerberg, because according to Wired The employees couldn’t have taken it worse. At a time when the company has given them more workload and is requiring them to be at 100%, many workers do not have time and believe that a hackathon is very disconnected from reality. Additionally, they are concerned that what they do during the event will not count toward performance evaluations, so they have no incentive to participate. It will take more than celebrations for the good atmosphere to return to Meta. Image | Xataka with Magnific In Xataka | Soon you won’t need to remember anyone’s name. Meta’s glasses will do it for you