I don't know about Llama 4. Competition is intense in this field so you can't expect everybody to be number 1. However, I think the performance culture at Meta is counterproductive. Incentives are misaligned, I hope leadership will try to improve it.
Employees are encouraged to ship half-baked features and move to another project. Quality isn't rewarded at all. The recent layoffs have made things even worse. Skilled people were fired, slowing down teams. I assume the goal was to push remaining employees to work even more, but I doubt this is working.
I haven't worked in enough companies of this size to be able to tell if alternatives are better, but it's very clear to me that Meta doesn't get the best from their employees.
The recent layoffs at Meta were really brutal, even more so than the previous ones because they unfairly put the blame on the employees. Several people in my (extended) team were fired. None deserved to be in my opinion. They were all very capable. They got "meet most" rating mostly due to external circumstances which weren't their fault.
As a consequence, we need to backfill these roles, it'll take months to find replacements and ramp up the new persons. This is without a doubt a net negative for our team. Maybe the goal is to kick every remaining employee in the butt so they work harder, not sure if it'll work.
All of this happened when the company makes huge profit and is hiring a lot. I'm still not able to make sense of this. And it's not only the layoffs, there's more and more hostility towards employees.
I don't know if Zuck is forced to appear tough to please Trump and Musk and perhaps save his company, or if he drank the kool aid, or if he's just trying to save cost to build new AI infrastructure, or taking advantage from bad market conditions for SWE. Probably a bit of everything...
Employees are encouraged to ship half-baked features and move to another project. Quality isn't rewarded at all. The recent layoffs have made things even worse. Skilled people were fired, slowing down teams. I assume the goal was to push remaining employees to work even more, but I doubt this is working.
I haven't worked in enough companies of this size to be able to tell if alternatives are better, but it's very clear to me that Meta doesn't get the best from their employees.