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Former employees blame Reality Labs’ poor traction on chaotic culture
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Former Meta Reality Labs employees told Yahoo Finance that the nearly $50 billion losses incurred at the division wasn’t due to lack of innovation but instead a chaotic culture caused by frequent reorganizations and installation of top managers with no prior AR or VR experience.
“If you’re a senior director, they forklift you into any position,” said a former executive in engineering. “You can lead an organization, set priorities, take on anything from Instagram ads to AR software design. It creates this really weird dynamic where the people in the trenches doing the work don’t have respect for the senior leaders and the senior leaders don’t really speak the language of the technology they’re building.”
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Some employees also blamed the poor traction on Zuckerberg’s excitement.
"Zuck gets excited. Everyone rallies around what Zuck gets excited about. Boz [Reality Labs head Andrew Bosworth] gets a budget based on Zuck’s excitement, and then we go off and try to figure out what the product looks like. Over and over and over again.”
“He’s really big on the notion of an immersive presence across boundaries”
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According to Yahoo Finance, majority of the employees interviewed left at their own will while some were part of the layoff.