A decade ago, it was a real flex in San Francisco to say you worked at Meta, Google, Apple, Tesla, or any of the companies whose campuses ring the city like a fortress of wealth. Workers fresh out of college came to expect six figures, free food, gym memberships, laundry services, and company stock that only went up. It seemed less like a job market and more like winning a particularly nerdy and privileged lottery.

That’s not what it feels like anymore.

Next week, Meta is expected to lay off 8,000 employees (opens in new tab), roughly 10% of its global workforce, with about 500 of those cuts landing in the Bay Area. They will join a worldwide tally of more than 100,000 tech workers laid off since January, with more on the horizon. At Meta, employees are anxiously anticipating a 7 a.m. email Wednesday that will tell them their fate. To these rank-and-file workers, the AI job apocalypse feels like it’s already here. And even as they fear their own replacement, they are being asked by management to use and train the very products that will soon take their jobs.

“This is as anxious and stressed as I have ever been at a job,” a longtime employee at Meta tells The Standard. 

We granted this person anonymity to avoid repercussions from Meta and used a voice actor to protect their identity in this week’s episode of the “PST” podcast, especially given that the company recently began key-stroke logging (opens in new tab) all employee activity.

“If you’re on a work machine, you are probably being surveilled. But the framing that we are using this to train AI to do everyone’s job and the sort of unapologetic, ‘we’re training your replacement, and we’re not paying you more for it’ approach is just another signal of how little Meta cares about the humans that it employs,” the employee tells us.

The brazen AI-ification of work — and the fact that it’s the workers creating and training the AI who are first on the chopping block — is what makes this moment in tech layoffs different from all those that came before. And it is what makes tech workers who have weathered ups and downs feel more hopeless than ever before. 

On this week’s episode (opens in new tab) of “PST,” we dig into all this alongside The Standard’s tech editor, Heather Kelly, who herself was laid off this year from the Jeff Bezos-owned The Washington Post and has two decades of experience covering tech’s booms and busts. As the following conversation shows: this time it’s different.

The full conversation with the Meta employee has been condensed and edited for clarity and to protect their identity.

You’ve been at Meta for more than a decade. But since January, you and others on your team have been on edge about getting laid off. Now there is a date when you will all be informed: May 20. How will you know if you’re affected?

I’ve been through many, many rounds of layoffs at Meta. There is never any sort of official internal list of who has been laid off. The way that people find out is by going to visit their internal work profile and seeing if it says “deactivated” — manually going and looking.

A couple of years ago, one of Meta’s engineers wrote a script to comb through those profiles, so users can just list all the emails of people they want to know about, and it tells you whether or not they were laid off. So I still have my private copy of that spreadsheet. That’s how bleak it is. I have my layoff-checker spreadsheet.

If I get laid off, I’ll find out via an email sent at 7 a.m. to my personal email. By the time I get that email, I will already have lost access to all of my work accounts and everything internal. So if I am impacted, I won’t have any way to figure out who else was other than going on LinkedIn.

Does having a concrete date make you feel more stressed about looming layoffs than before? 

Well, it has been very clear that layoffs were happening even before the announcement. And with no sense of timing, there have been weeks where I am checking my email every single morning to know whether or not I still have a job and I should bother to get up and commute in. 

So it actually alleviates some of that stress in the short term, because I haven’t needed to check my email for the past few weeks, but it also makes it pretty clear that there is gonna be a massive event, and I am as at risk as all the rumors seemed to hint I have been.

How are you feeling about that now?

I feel torn. Working here is not easy. From the outside, there’s massive negative sentiment, and there’s certainly something there. But the pain of working here is not very well understood. It’s this grand calculus of what it costs to live in the Bay Area and what personal sacrifices you are willing to make and what you’re willing to do for money. On the one hand, I feel massively privileged and lucky to work at a place like this. On the other hand, I’m like, where is my line?

I have been coming to the end of my Meta tenure for a while, so in some ways, this might force me to do something I want to be doing anyway.

So what I suspect I’ll feel if I get laid off is an immediate flood of relief and happiness, very quickly followed by the sinking realization that I’m in financial trouble, because I don’t know how long it will take to land another job. Six months should be enough — a couple of years ago, it would’ve been. But I don’t have confidence right now that I would be able to. My partner is home with our kids, so I’m currently the breadwinner, and it’s pretty intimidating to think that might disappear.

Walk me through the roller coaster of emotions. Have you ever laid on your couch and just cried for two hours?

I tend to cry in the shower.

I will say that when I’m in office, I have on more of a brave face. But when I’m at home, if I have breaks where I might normally have had a lovely lunch in the sun, I definitely spend a good amount of that time sort of despondent somewhere in my house.

A lot of my feelings about my job are about the general chaos and not just the layoffs. There have already been two reorgs in the past six months. I am generally dissatisfied with leadership and angry that I’m meant to be productive. And simultaneously, I’m trying to be productive, both because I don’t want to be seen as a low performer who’s at risk, and because I don’t want to let down my colleagues.

So I sort of vacillate between being like, “OK, just keep your head down. Just try to do the good things that you think are worth doing,” and being like, “Oh, should I pretend I’m sick today, ‘cause I could not possibly show up and be a half-decent human?”

How does the stress compare to other points in your career?

This is as anxious and stressed as I have ever been at a job. I’m also just in a life planning phase. Should we move? Should we have another kid? Those are questions that are so dependent on finances. We’re definitely delaying some of these real conversations until after May 20. But at the same time, I’m already hearing rumors there will be another round of layoffs in the fall. So, like, when could I make a decision?

What’s the vibe in the office?

There’s a lot of doomsday joking going around. Very openly in [chat] groups that include directors and even VPs, people are posting memes about getting laid off, dancing skeletons, these kinds of things.

The other thing that’s a bit strange is that leadership is really not talking at all about the layoffs. The expectation is sort of like, “Be an adult, suck it up. This is what it’s like to have a job.” And it’s a little shocking, the lack of compassion. Of course, people are going to be upset that they may lose their job. Of course, that’s going to have an impact on productivity. Imagining there’s a world in which that may not be true is delusional.

One thing that happened over the winter is that we started having AI notes turned on for all of our video meetings. In the past month or so, it’s been much more common to see those being [manually] turned off so that people can speak more candidly about rumors they’re hearing about layoffs.

Are people taking mental health leave?

Absolutely. It’s actually reasonably common at Meta. It feels like a bit of an open secret. There’s a lot of people in my group who are out on leave right now.

Is there a sense that using more AI might protect you from being cut?

We’re getting some pretty mixed messages. In an all-hands meeting with Mark Zuckerberg, our head of HR said pretty clearly that AI use will not be a part of how layoffs are determined. But there is massive pressure to use AI, and there are a lot of internal leaderboards about AI use. People are absolutely looking at the amount of tokens they spend, the amount of minutes they spend using AI, and sharing that around publicly.

I will admit, I do sometimes talk to our internal chatbot and ask somewhat inane questions just to feel like I’m spending some minutes and spending some tokens. I fear that if I don’t have those logged minutes, at some point that will reflect really negatively on me.

Meta recently added key-logging software. How does that make you feel?

There was actually a really interesting post on an internal employee forum recently that was suggesting teams or humans that are able to replace themselves should get paid out five years’ compensation and then laid off as a way to reward people for replacing themselves. The first time I read it, I thought it was pretty bleak, but I think it’s actually pretty in touch with reality. It got a lot of support, which was interesting to see.

What do you wish people understood about what it’s like to work at Meta right now?

The pain of working here. The tradeoffs. A moment like this, where not only is some of the work maybe not great for society, but also we’re not being treated like humans, and as a manager, not really being allowed to treat my people that much like humans. The pay is good. It’s hard to have a clear feeling about anything else.

At the all-hands, execs weren’t super empathetic or human. It was sort of like: Just keep going. Just keep doing the work. Here are some facts about layoffs. Not, hey, maybe we made a mistake. But there was something Zuckerberg said that resonated with me. He said something like, I wish I could tell you I knew what was gonna happen, but AI is changing so quickly, nobody knows what’s gonna happen, and we’re doing our best. I don’t believe that he has the employees’ best interests in mind, but I do understand that this feels like a time of radical change. 

So on the one hand, leadership has an impossible problem. On the other hand, they are not at all empathetic enough or human enough in how they are leading humans through this era. 

Even if we haven’t lost our jobs to AI yet, we’re being commoditized in advance.

If you get laid off, can you find another job in tech?

I really don’t know. I do know a good number of people in my field who I consider to be very talented who have not had a lot of luck and are still looking six months or a year later. That makes me very nervous. At the same time, I’ve been working for a long time. I have a lot of connections in the Bay Area, so I’m hopeful that some of my fear is overblown. I don’t really wanna find out.

Will you stay at Meta?

It is pretty terrible, and I think I will probably look for another role, hopefully while still being employed. There are a few things I wanna finish out, but I don’t think this is a place I can stay much longer, especially with the continued rumors of more layoffs. It is too distracting and impossible to plan my own life. Yeah ... can’t do it.