Backlash Inside Meta: Workers Reject Zuckerberg’s Company-Wide AI Hackathon Amid Layoff Fallout

Mark Zuckerberg has scheduled a company-wide AI hackathon for July, but Meta staff battered by recent mass layoffs are pushing back hard, saying they have neither the time nor the morale for it.

Mark Zuckerberg’s attempt to re-energise his workforce with a company-wide AI hackathon has done the opposite, igniting a wave of frustration inside Meta. According to internal messages seen by TrendKia, many employees say the wave of recent mass layoffs has piled so much extra work onto them that there is simply no room for a side event like this. Others said falling morale and eroding trust in management had left them with no appetite to take part at all.

‘Keeping the lights on’
The mood was captured by one worker who wrote on Friday, “I’m literally preoccupied with keeping the lights on for my team. I have no incentive to participate, let alone have the time to do so.” For staff like this, just keeping their team’s work running is consuming everything they have.

What Zuckerberg announced
In a post shared with Meta’s roughly 70,000 employees, Zuckerberg pitched the hackathon as a way to build camaraderie during a stretch of deep internal unrest. Ime Archibong, a vice president of product management, later filled in the details, saying the event would run from July 14 to July 16 and would focus “exclusively on AI Innovation.”

Angry comments and sarcastic memes
The reaction was immediate and hostile, with employees piling on Archibong’s post with furious messages and mocking memes. One comment that collected more than 200 thumbs-up and heart reactions read, “I’m not sure that this company supports a hackathon culture anymore. People are being asked to cover more work with less support while their colleagues get laid off, while also trying to avoid the risk of causing SEV1s [serious technical errors] with incautious AI use.”

The same employee claimed that hackathon work would not count toward performance evaluations, deepening the resentment about being expected to drop other projects to take part. Dozens of others laughed and gave thumbs-up to a meme riffing on the comedy film We’re the Millers, captioned, “You all have the time for a hackathon?”

“I honestly don’t have the time to focus on this, and I’m expected to be 100% devoted” to day-to-day work, another worker wrote, adding, “I’ve participated in previous hackathons but this no longer feels like an option alongside pod sprints in my corner of the company.” A third staffer described it as “a disappointing change in culture,” explaining, “I don’t believe there is sufficient feeling of safety to spend time on hackathon innovations.”

The first company-wide event since 8,000 jobs were cut
Meta has run internal hackathons for years, but two sources tell TrendKia this is the first company-wide one held since 8,000 people were laid off last month. When a veteran Meta software engineer tried to calm the complaints by stressing that everyone is welcome to join in, the reassurance fell flat. “Every org I know has super aggressive goals, with efficiency gains expected and significantly less staffing,” one employee shot back. “There’s less time for focusing on other axis.”

Other concessions — and the desk fight
Meta declined to comment for the story. The hackathon was just one of several moves Zuckerberg laid out on Friday to lift his workforce and answer internal criticism over the layoffs and related grievances. He said budgets for team offsites would rise and that hot desking — the arrangement forcing part-time office workers to share desks — would be scrapped in some offices. Last year, a person familiar with the effort who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive talks said some staff had banded together to survey colleagues about the removal of their desks and the disruption and lost productivity they blamed on it, pressing management to give every employee their own space again. The layoffs, it seems, have freed up that room — even as they leave workers with far less time to hack.

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