[postexitus]

They are not replacing anybody with AI. Meta has been a bloated hell hole for a very long time now (maybe 10+ years). Nothing, literally nothing beyond Ads and AdTech makes a dent in their earnings. The complaints here - it's not only the "recently toxic environment"; I remember a conversation I had with a Meta SWE in 2019; he said "If I stop doing anything right now, my manager would not realize for at least 6 months - the stuff I am working on is that unimportant". It's not hard to see how people will get disillusioned so quickly when the job itself is this meaningless.

[bradlys]

This is large ymmv. Most people would get fired for not shipping stuff regularly. Just because some engineers at a big company are able to skirt by without shipping doesn’t mean that’s the norm.

The company has tens of thousands of people. There will be some variation but a lot of orgs are quite ruthless with their metrics.

[postexitus]

Agreed - also things have changed a lot since 2019. Having said that, even people who ship and are rewarded for it do work on stuff that has very little impact on the bottom line. Except ads.