Meta is like Squid Game? Ex-employee flags toxic work culture at company after layoff

Earlier this week, Meta laid off around 8,000 workers. The Mark Zuckerberg-led firm decided to cut almost 10 per cent of its global workforce, as it invests more in AI. Since the company announced the layoffs, there has been a lot of chatter online about its work environment. One laid-off engineer, Jeremy Bernier, has now gone as far as comparing Meta to Squid Game – a Netflix show where participants compete until only one remains alive.

On X, Jeremy Bernier wrote, “Meta was easily the most toxic company I’ve worked for. “ He claimed that many within the company compared it to the likes of Squid Game or Hunger Games. He added, “There’s a reason the Chinese call it ‘Squid Game.’ Others refer to it as ‘Hunger Games’ or ‘Lord of the Flies.’ I think they’re all accurate.”

Everyone to fend for themselves

Jeremy Bernier explained that due to the company’s performance review process, known as PSC, the culture was bound to get toxic. Meta’s performance stack ranking system is used to compare employees against one another, and is widely used by other big companies too.

He explained, “The company culture is basically every man/woman for themselves Imagine working on a team where every 6 months, one of you is going to get axed. Of course it’s going to become toxic.”

The situation, Jeremy insisted, was so bad that the company was holding up simply because everyone was fending for themselves. He explained, “The only mission bonding the company together is individual self-preservation. Save your own ass to survive for another stock vesting, and throw someone else under the bus if you need to.”

That is, just like Squid Game, employees may not have had a choice but to work only for themselves or they risked getting laid off.

The laid-off engineer claimed that Meta’s “bottoms up” culture was a “complete farce.” He insisted that technical leads (TLs) had more authority than managers at the company. Jeremy Bernier wrote that this left employees’ careers largely in the hands of technical leads, who, in his view, had power without responsibility. He added, “I’ve seen managers and TLs throw others under the bus and get away with it.”

This is not the first time Jeremy has criticised Meta after being laid off. Previously, he called the company’s performance-management system “absolute cancer.”

996 culture at Meta?

Bernier stated that in the department he worked on, Facebook ads, the team was around 90 per cent Chinese. And this, he claimed, gave way for the infamous 996 work culture.

He explained, “Chinese work culture is very different from American work culture, with 996 (9am-9pm, 6 days/week), top-down nature, emphasis on saving face (eg. don’t question your superiors), and toxicity being quite common.”

996 refers to working from 9 am to 9 pm six days a week, something that was prevalent in the Chinese tech industry. However, it was banned in China in 2021.

Jeremy also claimed that around 3 out of 4 impacted workers in his team were “not Chinese.” Though he added, “Just to be clear, most Chinese are very kind so don’t take this as an attack.”

– Ends