Meta CTO calls perk demand ‘very dumb’; AI gains reserved for products

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. He gets an extra hour, he told the room, and that is exactly where he puts it. He wasn't done. Go ask your parents, he suggested, what they make of asking your boss for more days off every time you get his ear.Why Meta's CTO thinks AI productivity gains belong to the product, not the calendarBosworth apologised afterwards for coming down "too hard," and floated the possibility that the question had been tongue-in-cheek. The position itself stayed exactly where it was. Sam Altman has argued something similar in softer language, saying AI won't shorten the work week because people will just take on more. Bosworth said the quiet part at conversational volume.Meta employees get four weeks off plus public holidays. Meta Days died during the 2022 hiring freeze, in a Q&A where Mark Zuckerberg told staff that some of them probably shouldn't be at the company. Two discretionary "choice days" replaced the perk.Meta already tracks what employees type, asking for days off was never going to landWhat makes the exchange sting is everything around it. Meta cut about 8,000 jobs in May, roughly 10 percent of a 78,000-person workforce, while committing upwards of $125 billion to AI infrastructure this year. The New York Times reported that the company had begun capturing what employees typed, where they clicked and what sat on their screens, to teach its models how people actually use a computer. Asked how to opt out, Bosworth replied that there is no opt-out on a corporate laptop. Over 1,000 employees signed a petition against it.Bosworth stands to collect as much as $921 million from a stock option plan tied to Meta reaching a $9 trillion valuation by 2031. So the productivity question already had an owner before anyone raised a hand. Someone raised a hand anyway, and got told it was dumb.Get the latest technology news and updates. Download the TOI App.