The Facebook group Meta wants to cut around 10,000 jobs in a second major wave of job cuts. In addition, around 5,000 vacancies should no longer be filled, announced founder and boss Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday. In November, Meta had already cut 11,000 jobs, which was around 13 percent of the workforce at the time. Projects with a lower priority are also to be deleted.
“It’s going to be tough, and there’s no getting around it,” Zuckerberg told the workforce about the cuts. Just a few weeks ago, he said the job cuts last year were just the beginning. In the “Year of Efficiency” that he proclaimed, at least middle management should be downsized.
Leaner, more efficient, more techy
The current layoffs and restructuring are likely Zuckerberg’s post on the meta blog according to all areas of the company. But at the same time, Zuckerberg hinted that the non-technical staff will be the most affected. Among other things, he named the recruitment team that should be cut. It’s about making Meta a leaner company with flatter hierarchies and a clearer tech focus.
In past growth phases, Facebook hired many experts from areas outside of technology, Zuckerberg explained. That was helpful for product development, but now priority must be given to the workforce in the technical areas, Zuckerberg explained. The Year of Efficiency is also about finding an optimal relationship between developers and the other roles.
Even if Zuckerberg painted Meta’s future in optimistic colors, he judged the overall economy rather negatively. Higher interest rates, geopolitical instability and increasing regulation would drive up costs and slow growth. “At this point, we should brace ourselves for this new economic reality to continue for many years to come,” Zuckerberg said.
The string concert of the tech giants
Meta also has to get back on its feet financially and keep investors on board. In addition to misjudgments of the business in the booming Corona times, inflation and the collapse of advertising opportunities are causing the company to plummet. The reluctance of advertising customers, who pay more attention to their money, is clearly noticeable in the balance sheets. The Tiktok app is also a strong rival in the fight for advertising dollars.
At the same time, Zuckerberg is investing many billions in the development of virtual “metaverse” worlds. Last year alone, the corresponding Reality Labs division posted an operating loss of a good 13.7 billion US dollars (currently 12.78 billion euros). At the end of 2019, the group had 45,000 employees, at the time of the job cuts in November 2022 there were over 87,000.
Facebook isn’t the only tech giant cutting jobs on a massive scale. Thousands of people have already lost their jobs, and the tech companies are said to have cut a total of around 160,000 jobs. Some observers also see the wave of layoffs as a result of “over-hiring” by tech companies. The companies were less concerned with urgently needed jobs and more with fishing good people off the market so that they would not hire elsewhere. Now some people in the overhang would be released again.
(sigh)
