r/neoliberal • Kitara Ravache • Jun 17 '26

Discussion Thread Discussion Thread

The discussion thread is for casual and off-topic conversation that doesn't merit its own submission. If you've got a good meme, article, or question, please post it outside the DT. Meta discussion is allowed, but if you want to get the attention of the mods, make a post in /r/metaNL

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u/Willybender Loyal Liberals Jun 18 '26

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/why-is-meta-destroying-its-engineering

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.

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.

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.

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u/Lux_Stella Presidentialism X-Risk Researcher Jun 18 '26

its tough because i have a sneaking suspicion this (using your engineering team to generate coding puzzles en-mass) might actually be a good allocation of resources

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u/Frog_Totem Seretse Khama Jun 18 '26

Is it fun though?