A Meta employee lost his job despite being a top performer. All because he shared internal company updates with his wife but not before it had already been widely reported in the media. Riley Berton, the employee, claimed he received an "exceeds expectations" performance rating for the previous year and was supposed to get a bonus. He was sacked just a day before he was set to receive it.
In a LinkedIn post, Mr Berton, whose bio reads "Staff Software Engineer, ex-Meta", said that Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg had posted on Workplace, an internal platform, about plans to be stricter with underperforming employees in the next review cycle. But this information was already leaked to Business Insider and The Verge by an unknown source.
He said he shared a portion of the internal post to his wife which ultimately led to his job loss. Mr Berton argued that he couldn't be the same person who leaked the information to media outlets, adding he informed his wife at the same time as Business Insider published it.
He wrote, "The timestamp on the BI post is right about the time I sent this post to my spouse so I can't have been the "leaker" or harmed the company in any way. If she had read the post over my shoulder or if she had taken a photo of the post with her cellphone, I would not be writing this. If I took my laptop to a reporter and let them take a photo of the post, I would not be writing this."
Mr Berton claimed that hundreds of Meta employees had been fired as a result of similar occurrences; some for just storing internal updates on their personal messages apps.
He wrote, "I am also hearing stories of people who copied and pasted the text of this post into their own Notes apps on their own laptops and were fired because Apple Notes syncs to iCloud."
Last month, Meta announced plans to lay off nearly 3,000 employees, especially those with poor performance ratings. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO, acknowledged the decision, saying the company wanted to "raise the bar on performance" and fire underperformers quickly.
