Facebook's chief technology officer and a longtime Facebook employee is stepping down from the role, headed to a new part-time and much different position.
The tech chief, Mike Schroepfer, said in a post to his own Facebook page on Wednesday that he would leave the role sometime in 2022. He will then be replaced by Andrew Bosworth, currently the leader of Facebook's augmented and virtual reality division, further signalling Facebook's push into that business. Schroepfer has been CTO since 2013. The news was first reported by Bloomberg.
Bosworth is another early Facebook employee and member of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's inner circle who has steadily moved up through the ranks. He joined in 2006, two years before Schroepfer, and was one of the company's earlier executives with the title of vice president. Over the years, Bosworth, known as Boz, helped build central parts of the platform, including its News Feed, Messages, and Groups, before moving on to augmented and virtual reality projects.
"This is a difficult decision because of how much I love Facebook and how excited I am about the future we are building together," Schroepfer wrote in his post. But he is not leaving the company entirely. He said he is to become a "senior fellow" within Facebook next year, a first-of-its-kind role at the company, although he did not say what exactly the role will entail.
Zuckerberg called Schroepfer "a close friend" in a statement on Facebook's press site and said he had "played a critical role in almost everything we've done." He added that the senior fellow position will see Schroepfer helping with recruitment and "continuing to foster our AI investments."
Schroepfer is among the first of Facebook's true old-guard to move away from the company, having been there for 13 years. But other executive departures have come in recent months. David Fischer, Facebook's chief revenue officer, announced his exit in spring. Then VR leader Hugo Barra left, as did advertising head Carolyn Everson, and app head Fidji Simo.
Not everyone is cheering the change, however. Samidh Chakrabarti, who was previously a director of product management at Facebook, suggested on Twitter that a Facebook without Schroepfer is "worrisome."
"After I left FB earlier this month, many existing employees asked me who could now best be their ally on matters of societal import," Chakrabarti wrote. "Who was on my short list every single time? Schrep. So this is indeed significant."
—Samidh (@samidh) September 22, 2021
In the post announcing his job change, Schroepfer said that Bosworth was responsible for the creation of Facebook's entire AR and VR organization thus far, now called Facebook Realty Labs, and led research efforts and hardware rollouts like Oculus and Portal.
"These contributions are foundational components of our broader efforts to help build the metaverse," Schroepfer said. Zuckerberg echoed that point, saying in his note that Bosworth's work is "foundational to our broader efforts helping to build the metaverse, and I'm excited about the future of this work under Boz's leadership."
Zuckerberg has been a fierce advocate for Facebook's push into AR and VR, saying on an earnings call earlier this year that he wants it to be "a metaverse company." The term "metaverse" refers to a manifestation of the social, physical world in digital space, like in the games "Animal Crossing" or "Second Life" — or, as Zuckerberg put it, "an embodied internet that you're inside of rather than just looking at."
"I wanted to discuss this now so that you can see the future that we're working towards and how our major initiatives across the company are going to map to that," he said at the time.
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