I suppose part of the problem is that even the employees likely don't know what sort of ship-steering they want, and hoped to gradually get enough context to eventually be able to see an optimal path forward. But unless conversations are happening constantly, that day will always be years in the future. And Facebook's internal framing that "those conversations should always play second fiddle to engagement" has effectively quashed any hopes of productive context-aware consensus.

The question on everyone's mind, of course, is: did leadership intentionally prevent these conversations and from-research-to-practice pipelines from occurring, or was their ineffectiveness simply an unintended side effect of the laser focus on engagement? Based on the anecdotes shared with media of how much of the balance was driven by public-relations considerations, one imagines that the perception skews towards the former. And that's not a good place to be from a retention perspective.