For five years, the former Meta employee had been feted as a high performer by her managers. She had even received a rare equity award in recognition of her performance, which had never fallen below an “exceeds expectations” rating. 

Imagine her surprise, then, when she was unceremoniously laid off this past spring.

Perhaps she should have seen the writing on the wall. After she took a medical leave in late 2025, her performance rating slipped. It turned out she’d initially been given an “exceeds expectations” rating, but her manager had been forced to change her rating to fit a bell curve. Her job responsibilities also changed substantially. She had always ranked high on the internal dashboards Meta used to track AI adoption, which categorized its most avid practitioners as “AI first” or “AI native.” But after returning, she noticed her scores had dropped and was startled to realize the dashboards had not taken into account that she was on protected leave. 

Another employee impacted by the layoffs, a former director at Meta, had come to a similar conclusion. He monitored his team’s usage of artificial intelligence closely, almost on a daily basis, and noticed the dashboards had “failed to distinguish employees’ leave from lack of engagement,” as he said in recent legal filings. In other words, there was no way to detect if someone’s ranking had been compromised simply because they were on leave.

In an era of forever layoffs, some tech workers have suspected that an algorithm or AI could be responsible for picking off employees.

Source link