Why is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

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Deepdives<br>Why is Meta destroying its engineering organization?<br>Leadership at the social media giant has been on an AI-fueled rampage through its engineering org. We report what’s happened

Gergely Orosz<br>Jun 16, 2026

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For two decades, Meta had a unique, high-performance engineering org; right up until around April of this year. For the first 20 years of the company’s existence, it had a “move-fast-and-break-things” culture, and in the early 2020s this shifted to a “move-fast-with-stable-infra” one. Engineers I know at the company were empowered to do good work, focus on impact, and to balance business interests with solid engineering.<br>But in the past few weeks, all that has changed, as if the leadership has been following detailed blueprints on how to demolish a proven, successful engineering culture in the most ruthlessly efficient way possible.<br>For the past few weeks, I’ve been sharing how bad things are inside the social media company for engineers in one of Silicon Valley’s most prestigious workplaces. In this article, we walk through what’s happened, and ask what’s going through the minds of leadership who are reducing software engineering there from the profit center that it was between 2004 until very recently, to the disdained cost center that it has become in just a few weeks.<br>We cover:<br>Meta’s pre-AI engineering culture

Investing in AI and pressing engineers to always use it

Core engineering folks feel treated like trash

Most embarrassing-ever outage

Internal mess

Self-inflicted wounds

Is it just Meta, or are other companies also acting irrationally?

1. Meta’s pre-AI engineering culture

I’d split Meta’s engineering culture into two eras: “move fast and break things”, and then “move fast with stable infra.”<br>“Move fast and break things”

In the 2010s, Facebook’s unconventional engineering culture had grown somewhat legendary in the tech industry, as the company went against conventional best practices and succeeded massively.<br>In 2012, when Facebook hit the billion-users landmark, the company produced a small physical book about its culture which was placed on employees’ desks. Presented with retro propaganda design, it was dubbed the “little red book”, co-opting the name of a famous volume of the thoughts of Chairman Mao, (1964).<br>At around 70 pages long, Facebook’s version codified its engineering culture: speed, fearlessness, taking ownership, and thinking outside of the box.

From the Little Red Book. Source: Ben Barry<br>Back then, mantras in Facebook’s little red book were also in print across campus, and included:<br>Move Fast and Break Things

Done is Better Than Perfect

Fail Harder

What Would You Do If You Weren’t Afraid?

Every Day Feels Like a Week

The Wright Brothers Did Not Have Pilot Licenses

The Foolish Wait

Fortune Favors the Bold

There was genuine focus on building good products. Also from the book:

More from Facebook’s Little Red Book<br>“Move fast with stable infra” culture

In 2022, I did what is one of the longest deepdives we’ve published on the topic of Meta’s engineering culture. By then, things had evolved, and much of any former recklessness was gone, replaced by the principle of moving fast, but with stable infra. Here’s how I described Meta’s engineering culture then:<br>“The culture is incredibly engineering-centric: much more than most of Big Tech. This might come from Mark Zuckerberg being an engineer himself, or because much of the innovation in the early days of Facebook came from engineers.<br>Focus on individual impact. Impact has been the bread and butter of the focus at Facebook. This is very true since the early days, and the focus on generating impact remains.<br>One detail in common with most Big Tech firms is that both the engineering culture and general culture focus so much on individual impact. This results in some people focusing on short-term, measurable wins and assuming that teamwork and split wins between groups might be less rewarded.<br>The lack of rigid processes. Facebook seems to have the least amount of processes or standardization across all of Big Tech. Don’t even try to compare it to Amazon’s engineering culture and the countless formal processes there. But even compared to companies like Google, Microsoft or Uber, Facebook’s processes are much looser. Most of this comes from the engineering-centric nature of the company and engineers disliking processes.<br>Surprisingly little emphasis on testing, documentation or code...