After Meta announced 8,000 layoffs on May 20, 2026, former frontend engineer Jeremy Bernier posted a series of messages on X describing his experience inside the company’s Ads organization. He said the group had long been dominated by employees of Chinese background, and that non-Chinese workers were routinely left out of meetings, lunches, team dinners, and eventually layoffs.
Bernier says the team was “90% Chinese”
According to Bernier, the ethnic makeup of his Meta Ads group was highly concentrated, with “90% of coworkers” being Chinese. He argued that the issue was not only demographic imbalance but also the workplace culture that formed around it. In his account, everyday conversations were often conducted in Mandarin, leaving the few non-Chinese employees present unable to follow or join in.
He described the same pattern outside formal work. Lunches were usually organized within the same circle, he said, and non-Chinese coworkers were not invited. When he tried to join, he said he was turned down, only to see the group head out together later. At one team Korean barbecue dinner, Bernier said Chinese and non-Chinese employees sat at opposite ends of the table, and that the people refusing to sit with them included the team’s Tech Lead.
Layoff claims were tied to broader management complaints
Bernier said he witnessed 7 rounds of layoffs in the Ads organization, and in 6 of them the people cut were non-Chinese employees, even though they were already a small minority in the team. He presented that as a visible outcome of a larger exclusionary culture. At the same time, he acknowledged that he does not have conclusive proof of discrimination and can only point to what he observed and experienced directly.
His criticism went beyond ethnicity and language. Bernier said much of the team’s daily work involved changing parameters, pulling data from outdated internal interfaces, and pasting screenshots into Google Docs. He portrayed the process as low on actual engineering work. He also said each change had to go through a Tech Lead alignment meeting, where approval could be withheld and delays could later affect performance reviews.
He described a manager who “set people up to fail”
In a later post, Bernier focused on what he saw as deliberate management behavior. He said a Tech Lead would assign work to employees who lacked the necessary background, refuse to provide context, then give negative feedback when the work fell apart. He also said he heard the same lead had tried to alter a deadline in internal documents so an employee would appear to have missed delivery.
His assessment of his direct manager was even harsher. Bernier called that person the most toxic manager of his career and said he watched the manager push a new hire toward failure, driving that employee to seek psychiatric care before eventually firing them. He added that after that performance cycle ended, the manager took 8 months of leave and later left the company.
Meta’s performance system also came under fire
Bernier argued that Meta’s PSC performance review system distorted employee behavior across the team. In his view, people were rewarded less for solving problems and more for building a compelling narrative around their work. Pulling in more teams and making projects look more cross-functional could score better in reviews, he said, while engineers who handled problems alone could be judged as doing work that was not difficult enough.
He pointed to another engineer who started on the same day he did and resigned exactly after 1 year, because staying that long was necessary to keep a signing bonus. For Bernier, that detail reflected a wider frustration with both the team culture and the incentives built into Meta’s internal evaluation structure.
Public reaction split, Meta has not commented
The posts spread quickly through tech circles and produced sharply divided reactions. Supporters said Bernier had described a long-standing problem in Silicon Valley teams where one ethnic group can dominate a department and shape who gets included. Critics argued that speaking a native language, eating in familiar groups, or seeing uneven layoff outcomes does not by itself prove discrimination.
Bernier himself said he cannot present a single definitive piece of evidence that would settle the matter. As of now, Meta has not issued a public response, and no investigation has been disclosed. Among his suggestions were requiring English in the office, setting stricter inclusion standards for managers, and reviewing possible discrimination cases.