Meta is once again facing criticism over its workplace culture after a ‘former’ engineer publicly described the company as one of the most toxic places he had worked at following the latest round of layoffs. Earlier this week, the Mark Zuckerberg-led company reportedly reduced 10 per cent of its global workforce which affected around 8,000 employees.
Among the fired employees, former Meta engineer Jeremy Bernier gained the courage and took to X to describe the internal environment at the company. In his posts, Bernier compared Meta’s work culture to survival based shows like Squid Game, Hunger Games and Lord of the Flies. He claimed that employees constantly competed against each other to avoid being pushed out during performance reviews.
As per Bernier, Meta’s internal performance evaluation system made an atmosphere where the employees felt pressured to prioritise individual survival over teamwork. He alleged that the company’s stack ranking review process encouraged the competition between colleagues because workers feared being removed every review cycle.
The former engineer also criticised what he called Meta’s “bottom-up” organisational culture. He claimed that technical leads often held influence over employee careers without enough accountability. He alleged that some managers and technical leads shifted blame onto others to protect themselves during evaluations.
Bernier further claimed that the division he worked in, reportedly focused on the Facebook advertising system, was heavily influenced by an intense work culture similar to the controversial 996 schedule once common in parts of China’s tech industry.
Although China has officially prohibited the practice in recent years, Bernier claims that similar expectations exist among certain Meta teams. At the same time, he clarified that his remarks were not intended to be critical of Chinese employees.
This isn’t the first time Bernier has publicly criticised Meta following the layoffs. In previous posts, he had also criticised the company’s performance management structure, describing it as deeply unhealthy for employees. The company has not publicly responded to Bernier’s latest allegations about its workplace culture.