Highlights:
- After Twitter, Facebook’s parent company Meta might fire employees this week.
- After the company’s sales dropped for two consecutive financial quarters, job cuts at Meta were long anticipated.
- There are a “bunch of people at the company that shouldn’t be here,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg once told staff.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, is reportedly intending to fire hundreds of employees this week. The Washington Post reports that while number of employees anticipated to lose their jobs may be the “largest to date at a major technology corporation in a year that has seen a tech-industry retrenchment,” the job cuts at Meta would be relatively smaller on a percentage basis than the ones at Twitter last week (about 50%). The company currently employs about 87,000 people.
The article further states that Meta would start the hiring process for layoffs as early as November 9 on Wednesday. Without confirming the firings, a company representative informed the publication that the company will concentrate on “investments on a small number of high priority growth areas.” Senior managers reportedly instructed staff to stop booking unnecessary trips starting this week.
For a while, job cuts at Meta were anticipated after the company’s revenue fell for two consecutive financial quarters. In an August meeting, even CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the company employed “a bunch of people who shouldn’t be here.” In the discussion, Zuckerberg also said he is “okay” if staff members feel alienated at Meta.
The Wall Street Journal earlier in September stated that Meta might reduce staff in order to reduce costs by at least 10%. The company cited the decline in revenue to macroeconomic conditions. Like most other tech behemoths, Meta saw rapid growth during the peak of the COVID lockdown, adding 27,000 new employees in total between 2020 and 2021. It is currently feeling the heat as a result of the Russia-Ukraine crisis, growing inflation, difficulties with TikTok and Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT), and other factors.
Even though Reality Labs, the project’s developer, is struggling to turn a profit, the company is still optimistic about its expansion, particularly the Metaverse project. Concerns were addressed by Zuckerberg on his most recent earnings call. “I get that a lot of people might disagree with this investment,” Zuckerberg said. “People are going to look back on decades from now and talk about the importance of the work that was done here,” he continued.
The action would be similar to Twitter’s decision to terminate nearly half of its workforce if Meta decided to lay off thousands of workers. On the first day of the takeover, Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, sacked key executives. A few days later, he fired about 3500 people, including workers at the Twitter office in India.
