Meta's leadership drafted "Project OT" in January to slash team sizes by 60% using AI to replace human work, planning massive layoffs in May and November. Zuckerberg canceled the November phase at the last minute after employee backlash, but the May 10% layoff plus AI reassignments still damaged productivity and morale.

• Meta executives visited Asian AI startups and became convinced smaller "AI-native" teams (3-5 people) could do the work of 10-20 person teams, driving a plan that would have cut the company far deeper than the 2022-2023 25% layoff.
• The actual May layoff plus reassigning 20-30% of engineers to AI labeling work caused immediate problems: critical domain knowledge disappeared, teams couldn't handle workload, and embarrassing outages occurred (like the Instagram zero-auth password reset bug affecting Barack Obama's account).
• Smaller teams create real operational risks—reduced redundancy for sick days or vacation, inadequate on-call capacity, no "slack time" for innovation, and fewer opportunities for junior engineers to learn from experienced colleagues.

Meta’s leadership shifted from a “move-fast-with-stable-infra” model to enforcing mandatory AI tools, tracking engineers’ every keystroke and click without opt-outs. This aggressive push has turned its once-prized engineering org into a monitored cost center, sparking outages and internal chaos.

• Meta shifted from "move fast with stable infra" to mandatory, surveillance-heavy AI tool adoption, tracking engineers' keystrokes and clicks with no opt-out.
• The AI push turned engineering from a profit-driving function into a monitored cost center, causing outages and internal chaos.
• Massive AI spending (Llama models, $14.8B for 49% of Scale AI, a failed $2B Manus AI bid) coincides with mass reorgs and plummeting engineer morale.
• Leadership exhibits "AI psychosis," demanding AI-driven fixes for problems that don't actually exist, further alienating core engineers.

Phil Eaton recalls how a junior developer at Linode, Drew DeVault, used clear logic and dogged persistence to reshape the engineering team’s architecture and decision-making culture. Eaton learned that you don’t need seniority to drive change—you need preparation, the will to debate, and the judgment to know when to push and when to let go.

• A junior developer with no formal authority (everyone was titled "Developer") reshaped Linode's entire engineering architecture and culture through logic and persistence rather than seniority.
• Influence comes from preparation, sticking to your argument, and acting in good faith—not from waiting for permission from senior colleagues.
• Without someone willing to push back, teams drift toward popular or easy decisions instead of smart ones.
• Pushing too hard has real costs—Eaton's own overly aggressive advocacy once drove teammates to quit, teaching him when to press an argument and when to let go.