Facebook employees, disgruntled after a long year of layoffs and sluggish growth, are speaking unguardedly about the systemic failures at the company and among its top management.
The Washington Post spoke to a number of current and former employees of Facebook (now known as Meta) , the tech giant which has arguably been hardest-hit by the industry-wide slump across Silicon Valley.
“What was special about Meta was the trust. We drank the Kool-Aid and really felt like it was our company [and] even willingly defended it when everyone said we were evil incarnate,” one employee told the newspaper. “But that’s been shattered, so it feels like a betrayal.”
Employees spoke about the company’s numerous failed products, including its disastrous pivot to a focus on VR technology that the public has been slow to adopt.
As the Post notes, even when they do use VR, they don’t necessarily opt for Facebook products. The tech giant staked much on Horizon Worlds, the virtual world Zuckerberg hoped would be the premier destination in the “metaverse” — but users prefer alternatives, like the popular massively-multiplayer VR game Rec Room.
One advantage that the latter has over the former is that it is not limited to Facebook platforms. Rec Room can be played on PC, Xbox, Playstation, iOS and Android systems, as well as Facebook’s own Oculus devices. Horizon Worlds, by comparison, can only be played on the Oculus Rift and Meta Quest.
Of the company’s failure to drive adoption of its VR hardware devices, one former employee said “It was built like a software company that was trying to experiment instead of a mature hardware company that was trying to build hardware.”
Widely perceived as having failed in its pivot to VR, Zuckerberg is now trumpeting Facebook’s renewed focus on AI, which has led to a rebound in the company’s stock. But the company is not seen as the market leader in this arena, a position still occupied by Microsoft-backed OpenAI and its ChatGPT product.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.