- General
- September 23, 2021
- 6 minutes read
Moves: Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer To Step Down
There’s a major leadership change at the social media giant Facebook, Inc. The company’s long-time Chief Technology Officer (CTO), in…
There’s a major leadership change at the social media giant Facebook, Inc. The company’s long-time Chief Technology Officer (CTO), in the person of Mike Schroepfer, is stepping down from his role. His departure plans were made known in a recent SEC filing.
- Schroepfer will leave the CTO role by next year but won’t leave Facebook entirely. He’ll be transitioning to the role of “Senior Fellow” at the company, a position that seems to have been created just for him as he’ll be the first to adopt it.
- When he steps down, Schroepfer will be replaced by a star engineer at Facebook named Andrew Bosworth, the company’s current vice president of augmented and virtual reality. Bosworth is a crucial leader for Facebook’s hardware development and R&D efforts and a known close confidant of CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
- As Bosworth takes up the CTO role, he’ll be switching from leading just Facebook’s hardware team of 10,000+ employees to both the hardware and software teams and artificial intelligence efforts, with thousands of more employees to oversee. It’s a significant step-up for his career.
Schroepfer is leaving the CTO role after over a decade of heading Facebook’s broader engineering operations. He joined the social media giant in 2008 when it was still a smaller startup as Vice President of Engineering and was elevated to the CTO role in 2013.
- Under Schroepfer’s leadership, Facebook’s engineering and technology operations have scaled to enormous heights, though riding on the backs of many scandals that have made the company infamous.
- As CTO, Schroepfer has expectedly been one of Facebook’s highest-paid employees. Data shows that he’s received a total of $180mn in compensation from 2011-2020.
No concrete reason was provided for Schroepfer’s departure or, as usual with executives, it’s to spend more time on family and philanthropy even though there may be other reasons underneath. Or maybe this time, there’s no actual reason lurking underneath, and Schroepfer truly wants to spend more time on family and philanthropy, as he implied on his Facebook departure post.
