Happy Nice Mall

Google’s employees are called Google employees. Amazon’s employees are known as Amazonians. Yahoo’s employees were Yahoo.

This was an enigma for Facebook employees, known as long-time Facebook users. changed its name to Meta Last time of last year.

Terminology is no longer relevant. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook and CEO of Meta, announced a new name for his company’s employees at a meeting Tuesday: Metamates.

Mr. Zuckerberg introduced the term as part of an overhaul of Meta’s corporate values ​​and said it needed to be updated due to the company’s new direction. In October, he surprised many by shifting Facebook to new technology. pseudo metaverse, where different computing platforms are interconnected over the internet. The move downplayed the importance of social networking apps like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, which are under scrutiny for the company’s privacy and data challenges, hateful content and misinformation.

So, are Facebook values ​​like “Be bold” and “Focus on impact” a thing of the past? They went. “Live in the future,” “Build great things,” “Focus on long-term impact,” and “Meta, Metamates, me,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in a statement Tuesday.

“I have always believed that for values ​​to be useful, there must be ideas that good companies can reasonably oppose or otherwise emphasize,” he wrote. Message to the Facebook page. “I think these values ​​reflect how we must act as a company to bring our vision to life,” he added.

Silicon Valley companies have long had their own jargon and culture. Corporate slogans such as “Don’t be bad”, “Innovation leads to innovation” and “Move fast and break things” abound. Palantir, a big data software company, even placed the slogan “Save the Shire”, a reference to “Lord of the Rings”, on employees’ T-shirts. All of this led to posts from the tech world like HBO’s “Silicon Valley.”

For Mr. Zuckerberg, while the metaverse has yet to be formed, the latest values ​​represent a kind of new beginning for his company. But Meta’s employees met the reset on Tuesday with mixed reactions.

On some internal forums, hundreds of employees greeted the changes with heart emojis. But in private chat messages, away from the eyes of managers, some workers displayed more skepticism.

“How will this change the company? I don’t understand texting,” one engineer wrote in a private chat viewed by The New York Times. “We keep renaming everything, and it’s confusing.”

Another employee said that being a Metamate reminded him of sailing. “Does that mean we’re on a sinking ship?” Written by the worker.

According to employee posts reviewed by The Times, others said the new slogans had a “military inspiration” or felt like “the cog in a machine.” And on Twitter, a Meta employee made fun of the new values ​​and replaced them with “compliance” and “obedience.” He quickly deleted the message.

Meta did not immediately comment on employee posts.

The Metamates nickname was coined by Douglas Hofstadter, professor of cognitive science at Indiana University and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.” In chirp, Meta’s chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, said an employee emailed Mr Hofstadter with ideas for a rebrand.

In an email, Mr Hofstadter said Meta initially suggested “teammate” to describe its employees, as each half of the word is an anagram of Meta. He suggested Metamate as an alternative in a footnote. He added that he was unaware that the company had adopted the name.

“By the way, I don’t use Facebook and never have,” he wrote. “I actually stay away from all social media. This is not my style at all. But I use e-mail!”

In his Facebook post, Mr. Zuckerberg advised his employees to be patient with all of the company’s changes. One of the new values ​​is instructing employees to “focus on long-term impact” as Facebook transitions to metadata.

“Even if full results are not seen for years, we must take on the challenges that will be most effective,” he wrote.

Ryan Mac contributing reporting.