How Facebook is Becoming Meta

An Instagram engineer had his bags packed for a December vacation when his boss had him log into a virtual meeting to discuss 2022 job goals.

Their conversation soon took an unexpected turn. Forget goals, his boss told him. To be successful in Goalthe parent company of Facebook and Instagram, her boss added, was due to apply for a new position in the burgeoning augmented reality and virtual reality teams. That’s where the company needs people, he said.

The engineer, who had worked at Instagram for more than three years and did not want to be identified for fear of retaliation, was surprised to have to reapply for a job. He said that he had not decided what to do.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of the company formerly known as Facebook, has turned his company upside down since announcing in October that he would bet on the so-called metaverse. Under this idea, his company —renamed Meta— would introduce people to shared virtual worlds and experiences through different software and hardware platforms.

Since then, Meta has undergone an extensive transformation, according to current and former employees. It has created thousands of new jobs in the labs that make hardware and software for the metaverse. Managers have urged employees who worked on social networking products to apply for those jobs in the area of ​​augmented and virtual reality. The company has hired engineers from the metaverse of rivals like Microsoft and Apple. And it has officially rebranded some products, like its Oculus VR headset, to the Meta name.

These moves mark some of the most drastic changes the Silicon Valley company has made since 2012, when Zuckerberg announced that Facebook had to move its social network away from computers and toward mobile devices. The company restructured itself, focusing its energy and resources on creating mobile-friendly versions of its products. The makeover was highly successful, leading to years of growth.

However, changing the direction of the company is now much more difficult. Meta has more than 68,000 employees, more than fourteen times its size in 2012. Its market value has increased more than eightfold in that period, reaching $840 billion. The business is entrenched in the areas of online advertising and social media. And while this change could give Meta an edge in the next phase of the internet, the metaverse remains a largely theoretical concept, unlike the move to mobile in 2012, when smartphones were already in widespread use.

The result has been internal turmoil, according to nine current and former Meta employees who were not authorized to speak publicly. While some workers were enthusiastic about Meta’s turnaround, others questioned the company launching into a new product without addressing issues like misinformation and extremism on its social media. Workers were expected to adopt a positive attitude toward innovation or leave, one employee noted, and some who disagreed with the new mission have left.

What the metaverse approach means for the company’s current social media products, like Facebook and Instagram, remains anyone’s guess, two employees said. On Facebook and Instagram, some teams have scaled back in the last four months, they said, adding that their budgets for the second half of 2022 were expected to be lower than in previous years.

A spokesman for Meta, which will report its quarterly results on Wednesday, specified that developing the metaverse was not the company’s only priority. He added that there had been no significant staff cuts in existing teams due to the new management.

Facebook’s transformation into the metaverse began at its highest posts. In September, Mike Schroepfer, the then chief technology officer, said he would step down from the post he had held for many years at the end of 2022. In his place, Zuckerberg appointed Andrew Bosworth, known as “Boz,” who for the past several years He has led the development of products such as the Oculus device and Ray Ban Stories smart glasses.

Bosworth’s rise was a signal to insiders that Zuckerberg was taking virtual reality and the metaverse seriously. The two met at Harvard University in an artificial intelligence class, when Zuckerberg was a student and Bosworth a teaching assistant. They stayed in touch after Zuckerberg dropped out of college. Bosworth eventually moved to Silicon Valley to work with Zuckerberg.

Since then, Zuckerberg has turned to Bosworth for major initiatives. In 2012, Bosworth was commissioned to create Facebook’s mobile advertising products. Following management issues at Oculus’ virtual reality division, Zuckerberg sent Bosworth in August 2017 to take over the initiative. The virtual reality business was renamed Reality Labs.

In October, the company said it would create 10,000 metaverse-related jobs in the European Union over the next five years.. That same month, Zuckerberg announced that he was going to change the name of Facebook to Meta and promised to allocate billions of dollars to that initiative.

Reality Labs is now at the forefront of the company’s shift into the metaverse, employees said. Workers in product, engineering and research have been encouraged to apply for new positions there, they said, while others have been promoted from their positions in the social media divisions to perform the same functions with an emphasis on the metaverse.

Of the more than 3,000 job openings listed on Meta’s website, more than 24 percent are for virtual or augmented reality features. The jobs are located in cities like Seattle, Shanghai and Zurich. A job posting for “director of game engineering” for Horizon, the company’s free-to-play virtual reality game, said the candidate’s responsibilities would include imagining new ways to experience concerts and conventions.

Three Meta engineers noted that internal recruiting for the metaverse intensified late last year, and their bosses mentioned job openings on metaverse-related teams in December and January. Others who did not join the new mission left. A former employee stated that he had resigned after feeling that his work at Instagram would no longer be valuable to the company; another expressed that he didn’t think Meta was in the best position to create the metaverse and that he was looking for a job at a rival company.

Meta also attracted dozens of employees from companies such as Microsoft and Apple, according to two people with knowledge of the movements. In particular, Meta hired employees from divisions focused on augmented reality products at those companies, such as Microsoft’s HoloLens and Apple’s secret augmented reality glasses project.

Representatives for Microsoft and Apple declined to comment. Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal previously reported on some of the personnel moves.

Meta employees have been asked to contribute to the change in other ways. In November, they were asked to sign up for Project Aria, an effort to gather data to develop future augmented reality glasses, according to an internal memo that was reviewed by The New York Times.

The employees could “earn points and promotional items” by wearing the glasses and collecting data through the device’s cameras and sensors, according to the memo. To reduce privacy concerns for employees being recorded with the glasses, they were asked to wear a T-shirt identifying them as “research participants” and told they could not see or hear the raw data captured by the glasses. , according to the note.

In a meeting with all company staff, days after Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would bet on the metaverse, Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer, answered questions from employees about the change.

She said she was “excited” about the possibilities of the metaverse and asked attendees to imagine the endless opportunities that would be available to people around the world, according to two employees who heard the virtual meeting.

Many employees showed their enthusiasm using heart emojis. However, in a private chat for engineers analyzed by the Times, one employee wrote: “Who is going to ask how this all works? I pass”. (I)