How Facebook is morphing into Meta

New signage for Meta, the parent company of Facebook, in Menlo Park, Calif. on Nov. 4, 2021. Shifting a 68,000-person social networking company toward the theoretical metaverse has caused internal disruption and uncertainty at Meta. (Jim Wilson/The New York Times)

The Instagram engineer had already packed his bags for a December vacation when his boss pulled him into a virtual meeting to talk about job goals for 2022.

Their conversation soon took an unexpected turn. Forget the goals, his boss told him. To succeed at Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, his boss said, he should instead apply to a new position in the burgeoning augmented reality and virtual reality teams. That’s where the company needed people, he said.

The engineer, who had worked at Instagram for more than three years and who declined to be identified for fear of retaliation, was taken aback by essentially having to reapply for a job. He said he hadn't decided what to do.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of the company formerly known as Facebook, has upended his company ever since he announced in October that he was betting on the so-called metaverse. Under this idea, his company — renamed Meta — would introduce people to shared virtual worlds and experiences across different software and hardware platforms.

Since then, Meta has pursued a sweeping transformation, current and former employees said. 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 augmented reality and virtual reality roles. The company has poached metaverse engineers from rivals including Microsoft and Apple. And it has officially rebranded some products, like its Oculus virtual-reality headsets, with the Meta name.

The moves amount to some of the most drastic changes at the Silicon Valley company since 2012, when Zuckerberg announced that Facebook had to shift its social network away from desktop computers and toward mobile devices. The company restructured, focusing its energy and resources on making mobile-friendly versions of its products. The makeover was hugely successful, leading to years of growth.

But changing the company’s course now is far more challenging. Meta has more than 68,000 employees, more than 14 times its size in 2012. Its market value has risen by more than eight times over that period to $840 billion. Its business is entrenched in online advertising and social networking. And while the shift may give Meta a head start on the internet’s next phase, the metaverse remains a largely theoretical concept — unlike the 2012 move to mobile when smartphones were already widely used.

The result has been internal disruption, according to nine current and former Meta employees who were not authorized to speak publicly. While some workers were excited about Meta’s pivot, others questioned whether the company was hurtling into a new product without fixing issues such as misinformation and extremism on its social platforms. Workers were expected to adopt a positive attitude toward innovation or leave, one employee said, and some who disagreed with the new mission have departed.

What the metaverse focus means for the company’s existing social networking products like Facebook and Instagram remains in flux, two employees said. At Facebook and Instagram, some teams have shrunk over the last four months, they said, adding that they expected their budgets for the second half of 2022 to be smaller than in previous years.

A spokesperson for Meta, which reports quarterly earnings on Wednesday, said building for the metaverse was not the company’s only priority. He added that there hadn't been significant job cuts to existing teams because of the new direction.

Facebook’s pivot to the metaverse started in its top ranks. In September, Mike Schroepfer, the long-serving chief technology officer, said he would step down by the end of 2022. In his place, Zuckerberg appointed Andrew Bosworth, known as “Boz,” who has for the past few years led development on products like the Oculus headsets and Ray Ban Stories smart glasses.

Bosworth’s ascendancy was a sign to insiders that Zuckerberg was taking virtual reality and the metaverse seriously. The two had met at Harvard in an artificial intelligence class, when Zuckerberg was a student and Bosworth was a teacher’s assistant. They kept in touch after Zuckerberg dropped out of the university. Eventually, Bosworth moved to Silicon Valley to work for Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg has since turned to Bosworth for major initiatives. In 2012, Bosworth was given the task of building out Facebook’s mobile advertising products. After management issues at the Oculus virtual reality division, Zuckerberg dispatched Bosworth in August 2017 to take over the initiative. The virtual reality business was later rebranded 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 he was changing Facebook’s name to Meta and pledged billions of dollars to the effort.

Reality Labs is now at the forefront of the company’s shift to the metaverse, employees said. Workers in products, engineering and research have been encouraged to apply to new roles there, they said, while others have been elevated from their jobs in social networking divisions to lead the same functions with a metaverse emphasis.

Of the more than 3,000 open jobs listed on Meta’s website, more than 24% are for roles in augmented or virtual reality. The jobs are in cities including Seattle, Shanghai and Zurich. One job listing for a “gameplay engineering manager” for Horizon, the company’s free virtual reality game, said the candidate’s responsibilities would include imagining new ways to experience concerts and conventions.

Internal recruitment for the metaverse ramped up late last year, three Meta engineers said, with their managers mentioning job openings on metaverse-related teams in December and January. Others who didn’t get on board with the new mission left. One former employee said he had resigned after feeling that his work on Instagram would no longer be of value to the company; another said they did not think Meta was best placed for creating the metaverse and was searching for a job at a competitor.

Meta also lured away dozens of employees from companies such as Microsoft and Apple, two people with knowledge of the moves said. In particular, Meta hired from those companies’ divisions that worked on augmented reality products, like Microsoft’s HoloLens and Apple’s secretive 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’s 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 for future augmented reality glasses, according to an internal memo that was reviewed by The New York Times.

Employees could “earn points and win swag” by wearing the glasses and gathering data through the device’s cameras and sensors, the memo said. To reduce people’s privacy concerns about being filmed with the glasses, employees were asked to wear a T-shirt identifying themselves as a “research participant” and were told they could not view or listen to the raw data captured by the glasses, according to the memo.

In a companywide meeting days after Zuckerberg announced that Facebook was going all in on the metaverse, Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer, took questions from employees about the change.

She said she was “excited” about the metaverse’s possibilities and told attendees to imagine the endless opportunities that would be available to people around the world, two employees who listened to the virtual meeting said.

Many employees showed their enthusiasm using heart emojis. But in one private chat for engineers, which was reviewed by The Times, one employee wrote: “Who is the elephant in the room who is going to ask how all of it works? Not it.”
 

©2019 New York Times News Service