X's Nikita Bier Poaches Distraught Meta 'Data Engineers', Offers Exceeding Snack Budgets

In a jab apparently aimed squarely at Meta's well-publicised employee morale crisis, X's head of product Nikita Bier took to the platform to make a recruiting pitch to 'neglected' employees at the social media rival, promising X 'will match or even exceed any snack budget offer.'

The post landed just days after Meta's own leadership admitted, in stark terms, that things inside the company are not okay. Meta Chief Technology Officer Andrew 'Boz' Bosworth told staff during an internal session that morale is 'probably one of the worst it's ever been', and that the 'vibes are off.' Bosworth went further, comparing the current mood to the aftermath of the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, telling employees the atmosphere was 'probably the worst' only that time around, with today's mood probably up there.'

Layoffs, surveillance, and an 'AI reorg' gone wrong

The morale slump didn't come out of nowhere. Meta laid off about 8,000 employees, around 10 percent of its global workforce, in May, as the company redirected resources toward its AI push. Beyond the cuts, Meta has been running software on US employees' laptops since April that logs keystrokes, clicks and periodic screenshots to help train its AI agents, with no opt-out for most staff, though European employees are exempt under local labor protections.

Thousands of remaining staff were also reassigned without much warning. Roughly 7,000 employees were forcibly reassigned in May to a new Applied AI division, tasked with generating coding puzzles and training data, work one employee described to Wired as feeling like a 'gulag.' Bosworth himself conceded leadership had mishandled communication around the shift, admitting in an internal memo that the company had done 'an atrocious job explaining the vision' behind the reorganisation and had undermined employees' faith that their expertise would be valued.

Compensation hasn't helped the mood either. Meta trimmed the stock portion of annual raises by 5 percent in February, on top of a 10 percent cut the year before.

Meta's fix: more snacks, fewer direct reports

Facing the backlash, Meta's response leaned heavily on perks rather than policy reversals. The company is increasing budgets for office perks including snacks, travel and events, capping managers at roughly 20 direct reports, and pledging greater transparency going forward. In his memo, Bosworth said he wanted to 'rekindle the best of the culture,' while acknowledging that some stretches would demand sacrifice as the company competes in AI.

It's against this backdrop that Bier's post reads less like a casual jab and more like calculated trolling. Bier is no stranger to this kind of public provocation. He spent years angling for a role at X before Elon Musk's company brought him on as head of product, and has built a reputation for blunt, high-visibility posts that blur the line between humor and strategy.

Published on: Friday, June 19, 2026, 10:45 AM IST