I want to present another way of looking at this, & identifying it as a brilliant move. This is just one lens, not representative of what I really believe, but I think it's an important lens to pick up & assess by.
Facebook makes a ton of cash, and wants to be a place where sharp, bright, talented engineers want to come work. But the family of apps are all semi-done products; they're late industrial creations, heavily refined, and there's just not a lot of open possibility space to do good things with them.
Meta is a break. It's a way to create new grounds, explore new ideas. Whether the ideas are good or bad almost doesn't matter, compared to re-creating a company with some real will, drive, & possibility in front of it. Unchaining yourself from the town-planner stage of maturity that you've been whiling away at for almost a decade & creating permissions to try interesting things, to make new space where you're not always stepping on legacy concerns: I almost can't imagine not doing this.
And Meta has a fairly catchy, nebulous set of ideas behind it. It's difficult to imagine how Facebook/Meta can really make anywhere near as much impact, make a clear win here. But I'm at a loss to think of other bits of terrain that are both not-yet-settled/won, and simultaneously as compelling & interesting to a potential employee-base. If I ran a hugely successful company that had more-or-less established itself & wasn't in existential peril & falling position, I'd be asking myself the same question: what would be fun for us to do? What would keep my us well engaged & might possibly yield some epic shit? Meta is a not bad answer.
Facebook makes a ton of cash, and wants to be a place where sharp, bright, talented engineers want to come work. But the family of apps are all semi-done products; they're late industrial creations, heavily refined, and there's just not a lot of open possibility space to do good things with them.
Meta is a break. It's a way to create new grounds, explore new ideas. Whether the ideas are good or bad almost doesn't matter, compared to re-creating a company with some real will, drive, & possibility in front of it. Unchaining yourself from the town-planner stage of maturity that you've been whiling away at for almost a decade & creating permissions to try interesting things, to make new space where you're not always stepping on legacy concerns: I almost can't imagine not doing this.
And Meta has a fairly catchy, nebulous set of ideas behind it. It's difficult to imagine how Facebook/Meta can really make anywhere near as much impact, make a clear win here. But I'm at a loss to think of other bits of terrain that are both not-yet-settled/won, and simultaneously as compelling & interesting to a potential employee-base. If I ran a hugely successful company that had more-or-less established itself & wasn't in existential peril & falling position, I'd be asking myself the same question: what would be fun for us to do? What would keep my us well engaged & might possibly yield some epic shit? Meta is a not bad answer.