What it was like working on LLMs and security at Meta (2022-2026)
Joshua Saxe
SubscribeSign in
What it was like working on LLMs and security at Meta (2022-2026)
Joshua Saxe<br>May 20, 2026
124
Share
I loved my time at Meta, and I also counted the days between equity vests and daydreamed about quitting on the morning after almost every one. It was the most exciting engineering culture I’ve been part of, and at its worst it could feel like a perverse psychology experiment. I was proud to work on Llama, the foundations of LLM security, and securing 3.5 billion people’s data and devices; I was also embarrassed by the internal incentives that motivated us to keep people wasting more and more minutes of their one wild and precious life scrolling Instagram Reels.<br>I left of my own volition at the end of February; since then the place seems to have deepened its cultural crisis. Many of the people I looked up to have now gone to Anthropic, OpenAI, Thinking Machines, and Microsoft. With some distance from working there, after layoffs, departures, and the strange feeling of watching a place I loved take one more step down the staircase of its cultural ruin, it feels like the right moment to write something in the hopes it’ll be helpful to myself and others.<br>A Beehive of Individual Ambition<br>Imagine someone who freaked out the one time they got an A-minus, who has passed a series of meritocratic gates and received the appropriate accolades and awards, and for whom getting into Meta was like getting into their second-choice elite college, and is now at Meta, and expects a series of good accolades and rewards to continue to be meted out by the new institution they’ve joined.<br>This felt like the median engineer and product manager at Meta; the company recruited for and filtered for such people, placing them inside a Skinnerian conditioning experiment in which bad performance gets you managed out and good performance is rewarded with money that can change the shape of your life, or at least buy you a house and a financial cushion in San Jose or Fremont; everyone at Meta, behind friendly collegial poker faces, is running desperately from the former and manically chasing the latter.<br>The upside of this is that you could assume far more competence from basically everyone you interacted with there than at other places I’ve worked, and sense a kind of background urgency and fight or flight trauma energy animating whatever they were doing, including when they were collaborating with you.<br>I joined in summer 2022 at the tail end of the pandemic hiring boom, when I suspect they’d lowered the hiring bar enough for me to pass; of the ten or so friends I referred during my time there (once the company had begun the process of layoffs and attrition and raised the bar again), none made it through.<br>I always felt like an odd duck; I’m self-taught, have a graduate degree in the humanities, live and work remotely from Kansas, and somehow clawed my way into the workplace and up the tacit hierarchy there without ever conquering the feeling I’d be found out, all this particularly acute because I was an ML engineer in a sea of Tsinghua and Stanford PhD types. To be clear, these folks were incredibly friendly (and often shared that they shared my neuroses when I got to know them).<br>Flatness<br>Meta’s employee net worth ranges from billions to nothing and is wildly unequal, but the company is also culturally egalitarian. VPs wear shorts and T-shirts and carry themselves like engineers. One doesn’t use the verb ‘manage’ at Meta; one uses “support.” In most companies engineering managers manage engineers, but at Meta, the engineers run the show and the managers struggle to keep up and maintain respect.<br>This felt actually meaningful and good, as did the fact that every engineer’s title was simply “software engineer,” not “senior principal architect of X.” There’s probably an IC9 somewhere at Meta who runs all of Meta’s billion-dollar datacenters and undersea network cabling, managing billions of dollars in global capital, making eight figures, and their title is “software engineer.”<br>There was an unpretentiousness and a kind of Israeli directness and flatness about the place I really enjoyed; any engineer could propose anything, could give blunt, polite feedback about anything to anyone, although how far the proposal or critique traveled depended somewhat on prestige, social network, and level.<br>Also, the place was full of nerds who played Magic the Gathering, and were part of the Linux or chess or math club in college; aside from the competition there was genuine bonding over craft.<br>Workplace<br>The internal communication system, Workplace, is a fork of the Facebook app. Whereas on Facebook people flex about their vacations, on Workplace people flex about both their vacations and how productive and impactful they are.<br>Whereas people on Facebook fret about how many likes they got on their wedding photos, people on Workplace fret about that but also whether...