Early last year, Meta’s chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, had a clear message for his staff. “You should quit if you feel that way,” he told one employee who said workers were being treated poorly. “You should consider working elsewhere,” he told another person who questioned controversial changes at the business. He was reinforcing the company Meta had spent the last few years trying to become: a lean, fast, high-pressure organization that no longer had the patience for internal debate. “You can leave,” Bosworth said, “or disagree and commit.”
But this month, in a memo and a meeting with employees, Bosworth sounded like a different person. Morale is “probably one of the worst it’s ever been,” he said, adding that the business had done “an atrocious job” with its recent restructuring. “We’ve undermined the trust you have that your specific expertise and contribution will be valued.”
Since 2022, Meta has remade itself around a ruthless management playbook that helped define a new era in Silicon Valley. Through relentless layoffs and many other unpopular decisions, executives charged ahead, emboldened by record profits and apparently immune to the building discontent. Bosworth’s comments last week were different — an acknowledgement that Meta’s leadership may finally be confronting the costs of its actions.
Meta’s workforce is at a breaking point. Employees in the UK are trying to form a labor union, decrying executives’ “cruel and shortsighted behaviors.” More than 1,600 workers have signed a petition demanding that Meta stop tracking employees’ keystrokes to improve its AI models. As Wired reported this month, things have gotten so bad that one frustrated employee hijacked a livestreamed meeting with a profanity-laced outburst directed at an executive. Another compared working in a new AI-training unit to the gulag. Others are so dejected they’re actually praying to get laid off so they can leave with at least some severance.
Against this backdrop, Bosworth was one of several executives in recent weeks scrambling to do damage control. Chief Product Officer Chris Cox acknowledged the “insanity of this company” that created a “difficult” and “brutal” environment. CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted “we’ve made mistakes.”
It’s unthinkable that Mark Zuckerberg would be a credible spokesman for change.Sandra Sucher, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School
“It’s a classic example of chickens coming home to roost,” says Sandra Sucher, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School. “They have almost systematically destroyed trust. They are trying to figure out how to dig themselves out of the hole that they dug.”
The digging started with a mass layoff of 11,000 people in late 2022, which Zuckerberg was at least apologetic about. The company then slashed another 10,000 jobs the next spring in what Zuckerberg hailed as a “year of efficiency,” and then another 3,600 in 2025 that he said was to get rid of “low performers,” effectively torpedoing some workers’ job searches (many of them, it turned out, had received good performance reviews). In March this year, news leaked that the company was about to ax even more jobs, but it didn’t confirm the cuts for weeks and didn’t notify those affected until May, sending everyone into a nauseating, two-month purgatory. In April, amid the limbo, Meta announced it would start tracking employees’ keystrokes, stoking fears that the company wanted to automate their work. And in May, as it laid off 8,000 employees, it reassigned another 7,000, many of them to menial jobs that involve training AI. Meta declined to comment on this story.
In a meeting with Instagram employees this month, Cox compared working there to “running a marathon in the middle of a hailstorm and then, like, your teammate gets replaced and then we’re recording you.” He added: “It’s like what the fuck.”
For employees caught in the hailstorm, it must have felt validating for an executive to empathize with their situation. But surely he and the rest of Meta’s leadership knew all these things would make employees unhappy, and yet they did them anyway. So why the sudden mea culpa?
Perhaps all the anger, dissatisfaction, and open rebellion was harming productivity. Or the particularly public nature of Meta’s dysfunction, with the crescendo of news reports, had become a liability for its reputation with investors. Or maybe executives finally realized what had become patently obvious to everyone else — that whatever Meta was doing just wasn’t working. The whole point of adopting this hard-charging management style was to get employees to innovate faster and catch up to competitors like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in the all-consuming battle over AI. Instead, Meta has been falling farther and farther behind. Last year, the company delayed — and ultimately never released — what was supposed to be its flagship AI model after engineers reportedly struggled to improve its capabilities; this year, it has repeatedly pushed back another model’s rollout to developers.
Which raises the question: Was the post-2022 Meta a huge mistake? Decades of management research suggest fear and instability are a surefire way to hemorrhage star employees, struggle with recruiting new hires, and suppress the kind of creative risk-taking that leads to meaningful breakthroughs.
“I hope we can rekindle the best of the culture we joined,” Bosworth said. “One where people have the psychological safety to take risks and do the right thing over a long period of time.”
Sucher, who studies trust inside organizations, says executives are making the right move by acknowledging what they did wrong. So are the small concessions they have made in recent weeks, including promising to reduce the size of teams managers oversee, scale back the keystroke-monitoring program, and increase budgets for social events so employees spend more time with each other. Employees who had been reassigned to AI training roles also now have the opportunity to opt into a different role of their choice, the company announced internally this week.
But the real first step, Sucher advises, is for Zuckerberg himself to offer a proper apology that actually includes the word “sorry.” And most importantly, she says, Zuckerberg needs to make a credible commitment that he won’t keep making the same fundamental error: treating his employees as if they’re not human beings deserving of respect and care. That means understanding that workers don’t watch their colleagues get laid off, submit to surveillance, and get moved into unwanted assignments — and then magically go back to doing their best work.
“It’s very hard to turn the ship on these things,” she says. “Usually, it requires a new leader. It’s unthinkable that Mark Zuckerberg would be a credible spokesman for change.”
Whether that ship will actually turn is a big question for the 70,000 or so people who remain at Meta. It also matters for the rest of the tech industry. We now look back at November 2022, when Meta became the first tech giant to conduct mass layoffs, as the beginning of Silicon Valley’s take-no-prisoners era. Will Meta executives’ recent comments mark a real course correction at the company and beyond — or just a temporary pause before they return to their harsher ways?
There are some hopeful glimmers. In recent months, both Google and Microsoft have been opting to offer voluntary buyouts over mass layoffs, a more humane approach that helps preserve morale. Zuckerberg himself has promised a period of stability, pledging to hold off on any more big job cuts — at least through the end of the year.
Aki Ito is a chief correspondent at Business Insider.
