Meta Letting Go of 10,000 Employees in Second-Round Job Cuts

The recent news of the Big Tech layoffs may have caused some of you to put your dreams of working at Silicon Valley on hold. Well, continue putting them on hold.

Mark Zuckerberg is indeed on a roll—a massive one.

Like Meta’s first round of layoffs, where they retrenched 11,000 employees, they are also not backing down this time. They are confirmed to be laying off around 10,000 employees and closing 5,000 additional open roles.

“Year of Efficiency” for Meta

To improve Meta’s financial performance and attain longer-term goals, they are flattening the organisation, cancelling lower priority projects and slowing hiring, according to Mr Zuckerberg on Tuesday.

In the statement by Mr Zuckerberg, the chief executive officer of Meta, the company plans to announce restructuring and retrenchments in tech groups in April and business groups in late May.

The size of the recruiting team will also be reduced in accordance with less hiring overall.

The flattening process of Meta had already begun at the start of this year, where some middle managers were let go of while others were reduced to individual contributor roles instead of overseeing operations.

Mr Zuckerberg said that “this update may still be surprising.”

But Meta workers were already anticipating this second round of layoffs and are noted to have increasingly high anxiety and low morale during this current period.

However, the aim of having a “year of efficiency” has been well received by Wall Street, as Meta stock has gained almost 60 per cent since the start of the year.

Meta’s Growth and Advancements

The company had seen a slowdown in advertising revenue and experienced its first annual sales decline last year.

Its employee pool had expanded rapidly during the pandemic as demand for its digital services increased. Mr Zuckerberg did what was best to cater to the needs of Meta’s consumers at the time.

In the first year of the pandemic, 2020, Meta’s staff had increased by 30 per cent, followed by 23 per cent in 2021. During its first round of layoffs, Meta had well over 87,000 workers.

The focus and investment of Meta have since been shifted to virtual reality technology and the ‘metaverse’ that it aims to create.

Meta hopes to have an “optimal ratio of engineers to other roles” to stay efficient, according to Mr Zuckerberg. This aligns with the company’s goal of spending more on tools such as artificial intelligence to help engineers write code faster.

This is not only introduced to make this year efficient but subsequent years as well.

Despite being one of the first companies to encourage its employees to work from home at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mr Zuckerberg is now trying to convince his staff to “find more opportunities” to work with their colleagues physically.

The First Round of Layoffs

In Meta’s first round of reductions in November last year, their employee pool was cut by 13 per cent, equal to about 11,000 employees.

The reason behind the layoffs, according to Mr Zuckerberg, was that Meta anticipated a huge growth in revenue following the pandemic, as most activities shifted online, but it was overestimated, and thus Meta’s resultant revenue was much lower than expected.

He also expressed a desire for the company to be more “capital-efficient” to adapt to the ever-dynamic tech environment.