According to The Pragmatic Engineer's Gergely Orosz, Meta's leadership has systematically dismantled one of tech's most storied engineering cultures in pursuit of AI dominance. Starting in April 2026, the company mandated keystroke and mouse-tracking software on all engineers with no opt-out, then forcibly reassigned between 30 and 50 percent of core engineering staff to data-labeling work—creating an organization of 6,500 people, more than OpenAI or Anthropic combined. The company measured performance partly on AI token usage, inadvertently rewarding engineers to game the system with unnecessary AI generation. The result was catastrophic: on May 30th, Instagram suffered a major account-takeover breach attributed to AI-generated, AI-reviewed code from gutted security teams, prompting Meta's Chief Information Security Officer to resign. Strikingly, this happened as Meta achieved record revenue and profits—yet leadership chose to prioritize building a competitive coding LLM over the reliability of the products serving billions of users. The fallout: Meta's engineers are now among tech's most sought-after talent as they seek employment elsewhere.

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