Mike Schroepfer Quits Role As Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer

The Chief Technology Officer of online social media and social networking service, Facebook, Mike Schroepfer will be vacating his role form the Mark Zuckerberg led company, with long time executive, Andrew Bosworth replacing him.

The change in hierarchy will begin next year as Mr. Shrorpfer takes on a part-time role and focuses on his personal life, with the transitioning expected to happen sometime in the year 2022.

Mike Schroepfer, fondly known as ‘Schrep’ had been a part of the social media company for 13 years and is a known close ally of CEO, Mark Zuckerberg and was hence surprising when he announced he would be quitting his position. Schrep termed the decision to leave Facebook as a difficult one as according to him “because of how much I love Facebook and how excited I am about the future we are building together”, while adding that he would love to focus on personal and philanthropic efforts while staying connected to Facebook.

But the man expected to step into his shoes, Andrew Bosworth, known as ‘Boz’ is also the CEO Zuckerberg’s ally and close friend, having mostly be in charge of the augmented reality and virtual reality efforts of Facebook, its hardware products like Oculus and Portal, Facebook’s video calling gadget.

Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg in a memo to Facebook staffs wrote:

“As our next CTO, Boz will continue leading Facebook Reality Labs and overseeing our work in augmented reality, virtual reality and more, and as part of this transition a few other groups will join Boz’s team as well. This is all foundational to our broader efforts helping to build the metaverse, and I’m excited about the future of this work under Boz’s leadership.”

The exit of Facebook’s  tech chief Schroepfer’s is coming in at a time extremism concerns have been  on the radar, vaccine and election-related misinformation spread on its platforms, regulatory pressure on competition, antitrust issues and user privacy among other issues.

It would be recalled that Fidji Simo, another longtime executive, Fidji Simo, left the social media platform over the summer to become CEO of Instacart.