As Meta races to recenter itself around artificial intelligence, the tech giant is mandating that more than 7,000 workers must move to new teams, and it’s radically changing some employees’ jobs. The Guardian has also learned that some of these reassigned employees will shift to two new teams: one building AI cloud infrastructure and another that’s building an internal AI agent codenamed Hatch.
Late last week, Meta employees received a notice that engineers had been “selected” for reassignment and would begin reporting to the cloud infrastructure and Hatch teams by the end of this week. Meta made a similar move last month when it reshuffled at least 1,000 engineers on to a new data labeling team called Applied AI, or AAI – at first giving them the option to volunteer, but later telling workers: “Transfers aren’t optional.”
“Our work, infrastructure and our products are fundamentally changing as a result of the continued acceleration of AI,” wrote Peter Hoose, vice-president of production engineering at Meta, in an internal post about the two new teams viewed by the Guardian. “The pace of what we are building is unprecedented, and these are exactly the kind of challenges that define what we do best.”
A Meta employee referenced last month’s reshuffle in a comment on Hoose’s announcement, writing: “Does ‘selected’ imply this is an [Applied AI]-style draft rather than a voluntary move?”
Further proof the Meta doesn’t know what the Zuck it’s doing. The rebrand has gone swimmingly, given all the time we spend in the legless metaverse.
I was recently reminded that the advances at PARC and Bell Labs weren’t directed from the top down - they were simply smart people given the job of “build something neat”.
Top down, forceful R&D is probably not going to be terrifically successful.
“The pace of what we are building is unprecedented, and these are exactly the kind of challenges that define what we do best.”
What is it that you do best though? What do you sell?
Moving 1000 engineers to a “data labeling team” and calling it applied AI basically seems like demoting 1000 engineers to non-engineering roles, I’d be insulted but people working for Meta in 2026 probably don’t have a lot of pride to lose. Seems like most AI companies outsource the labelling stuff so I wonder how Meta is justifying paying people engineering salaries to do it.
Thank goodness. Meta can’t collapse on itself quickly enough. Hopefully some of those engineers will be distracted from crafting spyware, for awhile.
Last I looked — not recently — Facebook was one of the more-competitive Bay Area tech companies in terms of base salary (though there are places where people can do better in terms of equity compensation), so they probably have some leeway to ask their employees to do stuff.
searches
This is only part of a larger list linked to above, but for 2025 engineering salaries only, base salary only, stock options and other forms of compensation excluded:
ASIC & FPGA Engineer: $299,880
ASIC Manager, Design Verification: $258,940.00 to $299,880
Director, Production Engineering: $354,123
Embedded Software Engineer: $169,313 to $269,081
Front End Engineer: $178,000 to $282,461
Production Engineer: $108,098 to $317,242
Production Engineering Manager: $258,524 to $309,797
Senior Staff Software Engineer: $311,029
Software Engineer: $124,000 to $450,000
Software Engineer (Leadership) - Infrastructure: $317,797
Software Engineering Manager: $200,907 to $328,000
Software Engineer Manager: $277,837 to $318,000
Sr Staff Hardware Engineer: $294,520
Staff Software Engineer: $258,524 to $263,803
Yes. I would imagine gathering data to sell to Epstein’s customers to guide their kidnappers could pay rather nicely, whether or not Meta staff realize the data they collect and sell could be used that way.
And I suppose AI adds heaps of deniability, which could be helpful whenever Meta’s best customers end up in court…for whatever reason.
I’m wondering if that has something to do with the reshuffle. If they move 1000 people onto a dead end team they might be able to lay them off easier
Totally misread that as “Transfems” aren’t optional. I always thought transfems were more into cybersecurity anyway.
Well, what else would those engineers work on? Most of Meta’s product lines are either stable or dead. If they weren’t going to AI, they would just be going away.
I hope zuck gets sucked into a turbine engine
The new yahoo of our time.
