May 14, 2026
Meta, Money, and Misery
Meta's New Reality: Record High Profits. Record Low Morale
Workers say Meta feels like a rich company having a full-blown office meltdown
TLDR: Meta is cutting about 8,000 jobs even as the company keeps making big money, and employees say morale has completely cratered. In the comments, people swung between sympathy, rage about artificial intelligence replacing workers, and blunt disbelief that anyone expected this workplace to end well.
Meta may be making huge profits, but the people inside the company sound like they’re living through a workplace disaster movie. The company is planning to cut about 10 percent of staff, nearly 8,000 jobs, and employees told WIRED the mood is beyond bad: think fear, anger, and a whole lot of "just get it over with already." One commenter basically summed up the emotional damage of the wait: spending a month wondering if you’re the unlucky one is enough to send anyone’s morale into the basement. In other words, the real office perk right now might be severance.
And then came the comments, where the sympathy quickly turned into spicy moral judgment. One person bluntly asked Meta engineers what they ever hoped to get out of working there in the first place, while another went full scorched-earth on artificial intelligence, accusing its fans of cheering on the destruction of jobs that were once "fun and profitable." The biggest gasp, though, came from a self-described current Meta worker who said the article was dead-on and claimed they’ve never seen people this universally fed up, with internal spaces becoming more "cutthroat, backstabby, scope-grabby, political" than ever.
There’s even union buzz in the UK, which gives this whole saga an extra dose of rebellion. The dark joke hanging over everything? Meta is still doing great financially while workers are doom-refreshing their calendars and wondering whether they’re being asked to train the very systems that could replace them. Record profits, record paranoia, and a comment section absolutely feasting on the chaos.
Key Points
- •Meta plans to cut about 10 percent of its workforce, or nearly 8,000 employees, adding to roughly 25,000 layoffs announced over the past four years.
- •Employees told WIRED that morale is at a historic low, citing layoffs, compensation changes, legal setbacks, mandatory role changes, and internal dissatisfaction.
- •The article reports that Meta installed software on employee computers to track activity for AI training; Meta said safeguards protect sensitive content and the data is not used for other purposes.
- •Some Meta employees in the UK are gathering signatures to unionize, and United Tech & Allied Workers said staff want to organize around jobs, benefits, and privacy.
- •Meta reduced the stock-based portion of annual raises for a second straight year, and the article says median total compensation fell to $388,200 last year from $417,400 in 2024.