Having worked at a similarly gargantuan and dysfunctional company, I can tell you exactly how this went down. Someone had this idea for AI profiles. They speced the product and took it to engineering. The engineers had a good laugh at how preposterous it is, but then remembered that they get paid a ton of money to do what they're told, and will get promos and bonuses for launching regardless of the outcome.
It all stems from promo culture -- it doesn't matter what you build, as long as it ships.
That is not at all how things work at Meta. The impact of the things you deliver as an engineer has a direct effect on your performance review. For better or for worse, that also means that engineers have a ton of leverage on deciding what to work on. It's highly unlikely that the engineers working on this were laughing at it while doing so.
Don't assume that you can simply pattern match because you've been at another big company. I've been at three, meta being one of them. And they have all operated very differently.
How do you think it happened, then? Having also worked there the OP’s story makes total sense to me lol. If you’re on a team with the charter to “make AI profiles in IG work” then you’re just inevitably going to turn off your better judgement and make some cringy garbage.
I think the incorrect premise here was that engineers always know what a good product is. :) And I say that as an engineer myself. It's fully possible that the whole team was aligned on a product idea that was bad, it happens all the time. From my experience though, if there's any company where engineers don't just mindlessly follow the PMs and have a lot of agency to set direction, it's Meta. Might differ between orgs but generally that was my experience.
I don’t think anyone took this seriously while building it, if that’s what you’re implying.
I’ve been at companies like this where you are told to build X, you laugh with your co-workers, and then get to work because you’re paid disgusting amounts of money to build stupid shit like this.
That’s part of why I quit to start my own company. It’s such an awful waste of resources.
You're kind of missing the early step where some executive had to sign off on this dumb idea. Otherwise it doesn't launch. It's only "impactful" to engineer performance review because some exec said so.
The exec gets "credit" for the project, so same promo culture issue. They just need to show increased engagement numbers for like one quarter and they can add it to their end of year performance packet. The fact that the project gets cancelled is either 1) another "win" because they're "making hard choices" and they can obviously justify why it should be cancelled, or 2) someone else's problem.
Also, another note, these sorts of big swing and misses are actually still identified as a positive, even when looked at retroactively. They're "big bets" that could pay off huge if they hit. Similar to VC culture, Meta is probably fine with 99 misses if 1 big bet hits. If they increase engagement even 1%, they're raking in billions and it is worth it.
Execs go through the promo process too. And also, some execs will sign off on projects that they know are bad but will make for good promo material for them and their reports.
No, execs do not sign off on every feature. Even at medium size (2000+ employees say) there is far more output being produced than could possibly be signed off by an exec team.
Seconded. It is difficult to understate how pervasive and dysfunctional promo based development is at some of these behemoths (Google from my experience, but I hear Meta is similar). Nothing else matters as long as what you are doing correctly fits in your promo packet.
Ship it quick, ramp up some high profile users that don't actually care much about what you're offering, and jump to the next project before anyone notices the problems.
There are 10,000s of SWEs at Facebook and this project was at most a handful of SWEs. (As stupid as it is, it did not significantly detract from prod bugs.)
I suppose the key dysfunction there is that someone can simply have an idea and get it done, without, presumably, review by other product folks or sensible acceptance criteria being put in place.
It all stems from promo culture -- it doesn't matter what you build, as long as it ships.