All the money in the world can't buy talent. If the talented people don't want to work for or with you, then you end up just burning through cash while the untalented/less talented deliver a subpar product.
The problem with Meta is the same as the problem in any mega corporation at that scale -- warped incentives.
The incentive to spend all your time politicking your way up the massive corporate ladder outweighs the incentive to improve the actual product: https://mentalmodels4life.net/2021/01/04/safi-bahcalls-innov...
There's even an equation that describes this phenomenon
Nobody is able to hire very many people who want to optimize for the quality of their work. Few people put 110% effort into executing someone else’s vision for someone else’s profit.
Thanks for the link, it is a good read.
Has anybody suggested "term limits" as a solution? Not that I assume they would be.
I don't know that it's actually effective at that (or if it is, that the inherent costs are worth it), but it's a bit of the reverse of most recent thinking: keep people for as long as you can if they're sufficiently useful.
This is what another commentor said was a likely cause for the intense focus on self-promotion and blame-dodging, since head down actual work wouldn't necessarily lead to Up, so one could end up Out.
Don't hate the player; hate the game. Personally I could not work at a place like this, as my tolerance for bullshit, politics, and wasted energy/talent is very low.
The 'FAANG problem"...