It seems like no one is really buying into Meta’s foray into the metaverse: Investors are begging CEO Mark Zuckerberg to pull resources from what has so far been a money sink, interested users are basically nowhere to be found, and even Meta itself has started to slowly pivot away from the project and toward the gilded path that is artificial intelligence.
And yet engineers devoted to the metaverse are still being paid “mind-boggling” sums, according to a Washington Post report published Friday, with total compensation packages ranging from $600,000 to a cool $1 million.
(For comparison's sake: An entry-level software engineer at Facebook is making an average of $183,000 a year in total compensation, which includes stock options and other bonuses, according to tech salary tracker Levels.fyi.)
This detail comes just weeks after Meta added 10,000 more layoffs to its tally — cutting around 21,000 workers since November. A Meta representative declined to comment on the report.
Of course, these salaries are somehow small change in the grand scheme that is the cost of the metaverse. Meta’s Reality Labs division, the part of the Silicon Valley tech giant responsible for building out the company’s augmented and virtual reality products, reported $13.7 billion in operating losses in 2022 in its latest Securities and Exchange Commission filings — somehow over $3 billion more than its operating losses in 2021. (It generated $2.16 billion in revenue.)
Couple those losses with its lucrative advertising business getting hit hard by privacy changes from Apple and broader economic challenges, and the math is not quite adding up for Meta.
There was a stretch of time when Meta had money to spend. Maddie Machado, the former Meta recruiter who spoke out on TikTok about getting paid a $190,000 salary “to do nothing,” said that Meta (among other Big Tech companies) hired “so many people without the intention of them doing any work.” This was perhaps especially true during the pandemic, when tech CEOs at large were betting on the sustained use of social media and other digital products and hiring accordingly.
But during this era of newfound tech austerity and mass layoffs — the “year of efficiency,” as Zuckerberg has repeatedly described 2023 — the idea that some developers are getting paid seven figures for a project that has not quite panned out is astonishing.
As of February, only 20 million Meta Quest headsets had been sold since their debut in 2018. Days after that information leaked, Meta offered a $500 discount — a third off retail — on its Quest Pro headsets.