How Facebook is Becoming Meta

The Instagram engineer had already packed his bags for the holidays in December when his boss called him into a virtual meeting to discuss work goals for 2022.

The conversation soon took an unexpected turn. Forget goals, said the boss. To succeed at Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, he would have to apply for a new role on the growing 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 who declined to be identified for fear of retaliation, was surprised to have to reapply for a job. He said he still hasn’t decided what he’s going to do.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and chief executive of the company formerly called Facebook, has revolutionized the company since he announced in October that he would bet on the so-called metaverse. [um mundo digital totalmente realizado que existiria além daquele em que vivemos; termo cunhado por Neal Stephenson na novela “Snow Crash”, de 1992, o conceito foi explorado por Ernest Cline na novela “Ready Player One”]. Under this idea, his company—recently 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 manufacture hardware and software for the metaverse. Managers asked employees working on social networking products to apply for roles in augmented reality and virtual reality. The company smuggled in metaverse engineers from rivals like Microsoft and Apple. And it officially renamed some products, such as the Oculus virtual reality “headsets”, with the name Meta.

The moves represent some of the most drastic changes at the Silicon Valley company since 2012, when Zuckerberg announced that Facebook had to take the social network from desktop computers to mobile devices. The company has restructured, focusing energy and resources on creating versions of its products that are compatible with mobile phones and tablets. The renovation was a huge success, leading to years of growth.

But changing the direction of the company today is much more challenging. Meta has more than 68,000 employees, more than 14 times its size in 2012. Its market value has increased more than eight times in that period, to US$840 billion (R$4.45 trillion). His business is rooted in online advertising and social media. And while the move could give Meta an edge in the next phase of the internet, the metaverse remains a largely theoretical concept — unlike the shift to mobile in 2012, when smartphones were already widely used.

The result was internal disruption, according to nine current and former Meta employees who were not authorized to speak publicly. While some were excited about Meta’s turnaround, others questioned whether the company was rushing to a new product without fixing issues like misinformation and radicalism on its social platforms. Workers were expected to adopt a positive attitude toward innovation or quit, one said, and some who disagreed with the new mission left.

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

A spokesperson for Meta, which releases its quarterly results on Wednesday, said building for the metaverse was not the company’s only priority. He added that there were no significant job cuts in existing teams because of the new orientation.

Facebook’s turn to the metaverse started with the top brass. In September, longtime chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer said he would step down by the end of 2022. In his place, Zuckerberg named Andrew Bosworth, known as “Boz,” who in recent years has led the development of products such as Oculus headphones and Ray Ban Stories smart glasses.

Bosworth’s rise was a signal to insiders that Zuckerberg was serious about virtual reality and the metaverse. The two met at Harvard in an artificial intelligence class, when Zuckerberg was a student and Bosworth was an assistant professor. They kept in touch after Zuckerberg dropped out of university. Later, Bosworth moved to Silicon Valley to work for Zuckerberg.

Since then, Zuckerberg has turned to Bosworth for major initiatives. In 2012, he was tasked with developing Facebook’s mobile advertising products. After management issues at the Oculus VR division, Zuckerberg dispatched Bosworth in August 2017 to take over the initiative. The virtual reality business was later 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 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 migration to the metaverse, officials said. Product, engineering and research professionals were encouraged to apply for new roles there, they said, while others were promoted from their roles in social media divisions to the same roles with an emphasis on the metaverse.

Of the more than 3,000 vacancies listed on the Meta website, more than 24% are now for roles in augmented or virtual reality. The jobs are in cities like Seattle, Shanghai and Zurich. A job offer for “game 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 increased late last year, three Meta engineers said, with their managers citing openings on metaverse-linked teams in December and January. Others who did not embark on the new mission left. A former employee said he quit after feeling his work at Instagram would no longer be valuable to the company; another said he didn’t think Meta was best placed to create the metaverse, and that he would seek employment from the competition.

Meta also attracted dozens of employees from companies including Microsoft and Apple, two people with knowledge of the moves said. In particular, Meta hired professionals from these companies who worked on augmented reality products 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 were invited to contribute to change in other ways. In November, they were invited to apply for Project Aria, an initiative to test new augmented reality glasses, according to an internal memo that was seen by the New York Times.

Employees can “earn points and prizes” by wearing the glasses and collecting 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 T-shirts identifying them as a “research participant” and instructed not to view or hear the data captured by the glasses, according to the memo.

At a company general meeting days after Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would go all-in on the metaverse, COO Sheryl Sandberg answered questions from employees about the move.

She said she was “excited” by the possibilities of the metaverse and that attendees should envision the endless opportunities that would be available to people around the world, according to two employees who listened in on the virtual meeting.

Many of them showed their enthusiasm by using heart emojis. But in a private chat for engineers that was reviewed by the Times, one employee wrote: “Who’s the elephant in the room that’s going to ask how this all works?”

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves