[autoconfig]

That is not at all how things work at Meta. The impact of the things you deliver as an engineer has a direct effect on your performance review. For better or for worse, that also means that engineers have a ton of leverage on deciding what to work on. It's highly unlikely that the engineers working on this were laughing at it while doing so.

Don't assume that you can simply pattern match because you've been at another big company. I've been at three, meta being one of them. And they have all operated very differently.

[chis]

How do you think it happened, then? Having also worked there the OP’s story makes total sense to me lol. If you’re on a team with the charter to “make AI profiles in IG work” then you’re just inevitably going to turn off your better judgement and make some cringy garbage.

[autoconfig]

I think the incorrect premise here was that engineers always know what a good product is. :) And I say that as an engineer myself. It's fully possible that the whole team was aligned on a product idea that was bad, it happens all the time. From my experience though, if there's any company where engineers don't just mindlessly follow the PMs and have a lot of agency to set direction, it's Meta. Might differ between orgs but generally that was my experience.

[93po]

I suspect they wanted to be able to say "worked on AI at Facebook" on their resume and this was their way of doing it

[adamtaylor_13]

I don’t think anyone took this seriously while building it, if that’s what you’re implying.

I’ve been at companies like this where you are told to build X, you laugh with your co-workers, and then get to work because you’re paid disgusting amounts of money to build stupid shit like this.

That’s part of why I quit to start my own company. It’s such an awful waste of resources.