The Department of Inconvenient Truths

Unless you’ve been under a rock recently, you’ve probably noticed that my previous employer (Meta) has been in the news a lot. In the news every day, in fact! There were the AI profiles and features on Instagram that I mentioned last week, followed by reports of changes to Meta’s content moderation and Hateful Conduct policies, and a dismantling of DEI teams and DEI initiatives.

There was also Mark Zuckerberg’s New Year, New You reveal, complete with abrupt shifts in leadership style, attitude, political leaning, and personal style. His fresh perm, prominent gold chain, and focus on “masculine energy” seem like a nod both to teenage boys and to Louis XIV, who I think would be deeply envious of Zuck’s lustrous curls. I bet he turns a nice calf too.

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But latest was the news of another impending round of layoffs, a projected 5% reduction in staff with cuts based this time around on performance. The rationale is continued focus on increasing efficiency, and an emphasis on “raising the bar on performance management and moving out low-performers faster” in order to backfill those roles – meaning those roles will be filled with new hires who will perform at a higher level, I guess.

Original MM readers may remember my thoughts on the performance review experience at Meta, even before all this happened. The performance summary cycle, or PSC as it is known, was already considered to have a very high bar. It was intense and stressful for everyone involved. It was also heavily weighted in favor of those who played the game correctly. If you were good at being high performing in a particular way, the way specified by the matrix that defined all the things you should be able to do in your role at your level, you had a much better chance of getting a higher performance rating or even a promotion than if you just, say, helped improve the product in a significant way. And of course, if you had a manager skilled at selling the accomplishments of their direct recruits, that went a long way too.

This week has brought up a lot of thoughts and emotions – not least being my personal conviction that every layoff I’ve experienced has been a gift, even if it that gift isn’t immediately apparent. Don’t get me wrong, getting laid off is horrible and stressful, and it’s especially bad in a job market like the one tech has experienced since about the end of 2022. Losing income is bad, but of course losing health insurance is no joke, especially if you don’t have a partner whose plan you can join. And I feel that way as someone without children! I can’t imagine what it would be like to lose my job if I had dependents.

Even so, I have found that, as with all breakups, losing every single job I’ve lost has been for the best in the long run. Whether because I was miserable at that job but too scared to leave, or because it forced me to take a risk on doing something else for a while, like I’m doing now. So these past few weeks, I’ve felt a deep relief that I am not working at Instagram while all this is happening at Meta. I can’t imagine the anxiety and uncertainty I’d feel knowing more layoffs were coming, this time specifically performance based, all while waiting for an injection of “masculine energy” into the work culture. Even writing that makes me want to lie down for a while.

Plus, of course, there would be the moral conflict. When I accepted the job in 2020 I already felt conflicted. I had turned down a role elsewhere in the company the year before. But like I’ve said before, when Instagram asked me, “Do you want to change the future of Stories,” how on earth was a writer supposed to say no to that?

Yes, I took the money. I am very honest that the money played a big part – that’s something I get to live with – but the idea of helping transform something that a billion people use to share their lives? Come on. I really did want to try and change Instagram for the better, to influence it as best I could from my not-very-influential position, and hopefully help people have a better experience using it. I figured that a product like this, used at this scale, should at the very least be built by people with the best of intentions.

It turns out it’s really, really hard to affect change from the inside. It’s not impossible. I did it, in some small but meaningful ways! But man, it is hard. It’s especially hard when you’re not in a role that has any actual authority or decision-making power. When your role is to influence decisions, to tell people how to think about a problem, to help them ask better questions, and to represent one of the main inputs that go into the overall decision that gets made – that input being insights generated from talking to people who actually use the products – you can sometimes make changes happen. But you don’t have any final say. And ultimately, as in most jobs, you’re beholden to powers greater than your force of will. What I found was that, to truly make change, I had to sacrifice my own career success and, in a way, my own job.

That’s one of the reasons that many people who lead tech companies are the way they are. In order to become hugely successful at that level, you have to care more about yourself, your position, and your power than about anything else. It’s very difficult to survive otherwise. And when you do that, it corrupts you.

There are certainly exceptions to this, as there are in every field. In my experience it’s probably like a 90/10 split. Some people really care and will do everything they can to fight on. It’s like in politics. There are people who are working to make change, but there are way, way more people who care more about protecting their position than about the people they represent.

The same self-selection bias is there too. Just as in politics, tech leadership attracts a certain strain of person who is adept at self-promotion and self-protection, as well as in manipulating opportunities and the teams they manage for their own benefit. Especially since, as in politics, tech companies are also staffed by people who start out wanting to try and change the world, or at least mold it in their own image. Over time it gets harder and harder to resist conforming to what the organization wants of you, to resist protecting your own job, or even to resist the lure of truly selling out.

Again, it’s the rare person who won’t end up like this, who will resign in protest or will actually fight for the betterment of the product for the people who use it. This is especially true in an industry that has worked overtime to convince itself that it’s different from other industries. It’s new and special, with its veneer of special geniuses who specialize in transformation, disruption, and meritocracy.

I’ve seen enough people get very rich in the 15 years I’ve been in tech that I am mostly surprised when power and money don’t change a person. To be honest, I don’t even think the people who do transform into the douchebags they always swore they hated are really changing so much as revealing their true selves. It’s not even hard to watch that happen anymore. What is hard is that so many of these people are convinced that the decisions they’re enacting - decisions that will affect the company, the product, everyone in the world – are what’s actually best for everyone else, not what’s best for themselves.

There’s a reason that, when these layoffs happen, you see a lot of people let go who weren’t in higher level decision-making roles. All this call for efficiency, and yet the majority of people who lose their jobs are the ones who do the actual work of building the products and fighting on behalf of the user.

Do you remember in 2021, when Frances Haugen released the now infamous Instagram Papers? That was the big info dump that revealed Instagram knew how harmful its own product was for teenage girls. I bring it up because, whistleblowing aside, Haugen did something that I think was pretty messed up. She may have been trying to speak truth to power, but she left the names of every single individual contributor on all of the documents she shared. None of those people had power. Individual contributors (ICs) are rarely in positions of authority, especially in research or data science. They have to be pretty senior to be involved in high-level product decisions, and even then, it’s usually people in leadership roles – who by default manage others – who make the final decisions about actual product releases and changes. The information she shared was important, but Haugen also put a lot of people unnecessarily at risk by attaching their names to such controversial research findings, especially since those names were responsible only for the research itself, not for any decisions that came next. And especially since what made everyone so angry was that, even armed with this knowledge, it seemed to the public that the company had done nothing (or at least very little) to address the harm the research had uncovered.

Right now I don’t want to go into whether or not this is true – in part because I honestly don’t know how true it is, I never worked on anything related to actual wellbeing or harm, I don’t know even close to all of the decisions or product changes the company made, and I certainly had zero authority over anything. I bring this up because of what happened after the papers were leaked. You might remember the official response, which focused on the fact that the research had not been done correctly, or hadn’t been framed properly, or didn’t take into account any of the positive benefits Instagram also has for teenagers. (Which are real, they do exist! They were even in the research, but they were ignored. Inconvenient truths of a different kind.) The internal reaction was the same. The fault was laid not at the feet of anyone who made decisions about the product, but at the people who had brought the insights to light. That was the turning point for user research at a company that was tired of being told it was always doing the wrong thing.

In fact, my theory is this leak precipitated the wholesale gutting of user research at Meta, after which many other companies followed suit with their own research teams. Yes, other roles were hit hard by layoffs, especially sales and recruiting, but those made sense given the constricting economy and the hiring freezes. Software engineers were laid off too. But the proportion of researchers who were laid off was much higher because there were way fewer of them to begin with. Then jobs for researchers completely dried up. User researchers are the people whose job it is to talk to users and uncover sometimes uncomfortable insights about the products these companies build, and then to advocate for building things that better meet those users’ needs.

At the end of the day, I imagine it’s easier is it to protect your job when you don’t have to take into account so many inconvenient insights about the people who use your products. When you can make decisions based on business goals or “product genius.”

I guess this is why I’m revisiting this topic, more so even than all the news, which I would honestly prefer to ignore for my mental health. But I am risking a small chunk of my own sanity here because I think it would be good if more people better understood how a lot of tech companies work. There are so many misconceptions about tech that seem to linger in the general consciousness. For some of you, this will boring or old hat. Someone recently told me that people are tired of the history and backstory of the industry. Everyone knows it, and what matters now is that we need to figure out how to deal with the huge mess we’re in. Sure, that’s true for a lot of people I know online, even if they’re not in the industry. But I think there’s an equally big swath of the population (maybe even bigger?) that is online but not Online. You might be one of them. You’re on social media, you use lots of apps and products, and you’re angry at how shitty all our apps have become, but you still get a lot out of those products? You also don’t really know how those products are built or who decides what. It’s like tech as an industry is a big hand-wavy concept, with a bunch of sociopathic assholes at the helm, and a bunch of pampered, entitled assholes getting paid a lot to do… what, exactly?

I started writing about some of this last year, but I want to return to it on occasion because I still think it’s helpful for people to know more about how these products actually get made. I see a lot of frustration that companies don’t talk to actual people who use their products. They do! The bigger question is whether anyone is listening.

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Speaking of! A quick housekeeping note. I am planning to move this newsletter off Substack over to Ghost. This shouldn’t affect any of you, since you’ll still get an email, but you may see some changes. Bear with me on this. And if you want to know why I am moving, I am very happy to explain that in a future newsletter!

See you next Wednesday.

Lx

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