I mean, they had Carthago Delenda Est posters for a long time, so the competitiveness has been there for an extremely long time.
The company has been known as kinda sketchy almost continuously since it was founded, yet people went there because it paid the most money.
If leadership is now thinking that an executive "ideas person", plus a small execution team fortified with AI, can bang out a product more quickly than the massive army of corporate workers they've been feeding at top of the market rates, and at the same quality level as the previous inefficient bureaucracy managed... isn't that plausibly correct?
Now, the company just needs to be the best-paying job available to enough of those workers. And the company believes this is getting easier for the company, due to the state of the job market. The workers who remain will remain motivated by money.
And the company may think they're not losing anything of value, since they knew that their culture was already sick.
Example: They think they weren't getting creative, aligned, diligent brilliance, amidst all the backstabbing and politics they'd created, and so mechanically executing on an executive ideas person's vision yields the same product result, faster.
From the outside, I think this shouldn't be a surprise, nor blamed on possible neurodivergence of individuals.
(Of course this isn't my own philosophy about morale and effective product teams, and I wouldn't want to work at a company like that. But you can see some company cultures from thousands of miles away.)
It was literally started as a way of creeping on cute girls.
It's never not been sketchy. I say that, despite the fact that it enables me to connect with > 1,000 friends across my continent, many of whom I hadn't had contact with in decades. Things can be both bad and good.
It was definitely very smart to buy them out when they did.
I just think you're focusing on the wrong part.
Not sure he's shown ability to do anything beyond making solid decisions on which competitors to acquire.
Well, their execution was also very expensive and yet garbage, which is crazy with how many insanely talented people they had to work on it at one point or the other. It seems pretty clear cut as executive failure.
Back in the day you could mention in passing "oh that guy is on a spectrum", but it was always because they were awkward and quiet, not anti-social.
Zuck has spent his life from birth in a walled garden. He cannot relate to normal human emotions. In a way, that's not his fault, but we showered people like him with praise for being "geniuses" and "visionaries", which did not help matters.
I'm "neurodivergent" but when it comes to empathy/sympathy, I tend toward the over-sensitive side rather than oblivious (as does my son, who is diagnosed with ASD Type 1).
I don't take any issue with that being used in this context, though. I mean, I wouldn't really in any context as long as the person writing it isn't intending malice -- they're just words, people can misuse/abuse them -- but specifically this context. "Neurodivergent" covers a lot of ground, but in reference to Mr. Zuckerberg, nearly all of us[0] pictured one of two things: Data (Star Trek) or Data with Borg accessories attached. Which you chose largely depended on your opinion of him, but both had an android character who has no ability to feel emotions or understand the emotions that others feel.
... and since good communication largely rests on people's understanding of your message, I think OP's word choice was largely sound. :)
[0] As in those of you who, like me, have never been in the same city at the same time as the guy so we know "him" based on what we read about him.
Arguably hacking Crimson reporters when they tried investigating him for activities at Harvard
Buying Whatsapp so he can have a monopoly
Copying Snapchat multiple times
I mean, I can go on
Now imagine every time one of these ideas happen a 2000+ person org immediately starts pivoting to work on it as its top priority.