A Facebook engineer who quit after attacking its 'intolerant' culture wrote a 1,000-word memo revealing some of the biggest challenges facing the business (FB)

facebook ceo mark zuckerberg

Brian Amerige, a Facebook engineer who earlier this year sparked a firestorm by criticizing what he described as the company's "intolerant" liberal culture, is leaving.
Business Insider obtained a 1,000-word memo he wrote saying goodbye to his colleagues.
In the memo, Amerige candidly laid out the challenges he said Facebook was facing, including a slowdown in sharing and a weak product culture.
He also praised the company's scrappiness and the way it assigns team roles.

A Facebook engineer who earlier this year sparked an internal firestorm by attacking what he described as the company's "intolerant" liberal culture is leaving — and on his way out, he wrote a 1,000-word memo laying out the company's struggles.

Brian Amerige, an engineering manager of product usability at the social-networking giant, provoked passionate debates in Facebook in August after he wrote an internal post decrying what he viewed as the company's "political monoculture" that was intolerant of conservative and dissenting views.

His document came as Silicon Valley grappled with allegations of bias and liberal slant, and after an engineer named James Damore made headlines with a memo criticizing diversity initiatives at Google. Amerige's actions led to the formation of an internal employee group, FB'ers for Political Diversity, that now has more than 750 members.

brian amerige Amerige, who describes himself as an objectivist, recently announced internally that he was leaving Facebook, Business Insider first reported. He wrote an extensive memo to his colleagues explaining why — and describing problems he says Facebook is facing, from team structure to the decline in sharing on the social network.

The document provides a rare window into how Facebook employees view its key challenges internally.

"My departure isn't because I think these issues are intractable. These problems can be solved — just not by me, not anymore, at least," Amerige wrote. "I care too deeply about our role in supporting free expression and intellectual diversity to even whole-heartedly attempt the product stuff anymore, and that's how I know it's time to go."

Facebook is battling a slowdown in sharing

While Amerige has made headlines for his criticism of Facebook's politics and culture, many of the issues he raised in the new memo aren't political in nature.

Instead, it candidly addresses Facebook's challenges and what Amerige thinks needs to be done to tackle them.

"Our product is also at a crossroads (and has been for years) as sharing in the Facebook app continues to dwindle," he said. "The pivot to Stories will hopefully help, but I'm disappointed by how reactive our future appears to be. Ultimately, I've spent the bulk of my time at Facebook trying to build a stronger product culture."

The scale and details of the decline in Facebook sharing that Amerige referenced are not entirely clear. But there have been various indications of the trend in recent years, including a 2016 report in The Information that said personal updates among users were down 21%.

Facebook's problems with privacy and the spread of misinformation and fake news on its platform also led to the company's first decline in monthly active users — albeit a modest decline limited to Europe — in the second quarter. And CEO Mark Zuckerberg has launched an effort to promote "time well spent" on the social network, rather than incentivize the passive sharing of news articles.

Still, the comment that sharing "continues to dwindle" is likely to be a big topic that investors and analysts home in on when Facebook holds its quarterly earnings call on October 30.

brian amerige facebook Amerige's pessimistic perspective on Facebook's product direction is also likely to provoke debate. Amerige joined Facebook in 2012 and was the technology lead on Paper, a news-reading app Facebook built in 2014. He subsequently started the Core App UI team at Facebook, and he also worked on Facebook Groups.

"From tech leading Paper, to starting and leading the team that built our UI foundation (FIG, now FDS), I wanted Facebook to be a place where people with great product sense, focus, intuition and a little obsessiveness about quality were attracted, belonged, and were rewarded," he said. "I think we made progress, but the headwinds have been and continue to be strong, and it shows in our future-looking product strategy and the relative rarity of strong product thinkers at Facebook."

Facebook's good parts: scrappiness and effective teams

Later in the memo, Amerige talked about the parts of Facebook he values highest: the company's scrappiness, and how it assigns team roles.

On scrappiness, the engineer wrote:

"I've always understood 'move fast' to really mean 'be scrappy,' and what a pleasure it's been to watch how +28,000 employees haven't substantially changed that. I don't think 'move fast' applies to product direction, design standards, or engineering quality. It's about process. As the company continues to grow, you will increasingly find that most people in any given room are new and don't necessarily know that it's ok to say 'sorry, I don't understand any of what you just said' or that they're supposed to ask 'Do we really need to wait for the monthly review?' These kinds of questions are our secret weapon against becoming a bureaucracy where innovative people don't want to work. So keep asking 'why?' about everything related to how we work."

And here's what he wrote about "roles and responsibility":

"The way we think about team roles is better than anywhere else I've seen. We let ICs [individual contributors, or engineers not in management roles] truly lead, we incentivize transitions to and from management for the right reasons, and we let teams figure out who does what with deference to strengths instead of functional titles. We could still do better (particularly around how senior ICs integrate with director+ level decisions), but this way of thinking is the industry leading and has made Facebook a very special place for me, as something of a hybrid between engineering, product and design."

'We've refused to defend ourselves in the press'

Other parts of Amerige's memo were more explicitly critical of Facebook's politics. He argued that it was "difficult to have meaningful conversations" about issues like freedom of speech and government regulation at Facebook, and he said he was "burnt out on Facebook, our strategy and our culture."

"Strategically, we've taken a stance on how to balance offensive and hateful speech with free expression. We've accepted the inevitability of government regulation. And we've refused to defend ourselves in the press," he wrote. "Our policy strategy is pragmatism — not clear, implementable long-term principles — and our PR strategy is appeasement — not morally earned pride and self defense."

Amerige suggested some change might be coming — he said he was "pleased to say that senior company leadership does take this seriously (as you will hopefully soon see)" — but said that ultimately, "I disagree too strongly with where we're heading on these issues to watch what happens next."

Read Amerige's full memo here »

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