Meta CTO calls perk demand ‘very dumb’; AI gains reserved for products
Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth dismissed employee requests for extra time off, arguing that productivity gains from AI should be reinvested into product development. The exchange highlights ongoing tensions regarding labor expectations and corporate resource allocation in the tech industry.
Why it matters
It reflects a broader corporate trend where companies prioritize aggressive AI-driven output over employee work-life balance, even amidst significant workforce reductions.
The question was a fair one. If AI is making Meta's engineers measurably faster, could some of that saved time come back to the people doing the work? At a July Q&A, one employee asked whether the productivity gains might fund a revival of Meta Days, the pandemic-era perk that added an extra day off to four long holiday weekends until it was scrapped in 2022.Andrew Bosworth, Meta's chief technology officer, shut it down on the spot. "Stop asking about Meta Days. It's very dumb," he said, per Business Insider, which spoke to three people on the call. Then he explained where he thinks the spare hours should go. Meta has billions of people using its apps daily, he said, and he hopes the extra time goes into building better things for them.
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