Truly, this is an awful moment to work for social networking firms. According to a recent Wall Street Journal story, Twitter went through a wave of major layoffs first, and now it’s Meta’s turn. With hundreds of potential cut-offs, it appears that Facebook’s parent firm is going above and beyond its bird competition.
According to those with knowledge of the situation, this week’s layoffs might start as soon as Wednesday.
By the end of September, social media behemoth Meta claimed to have over 87,000 workers; however, this number is projected to be significantly reduced as a result of the huge layoffs. According to the WSJ story, these widespread layoffs are anticipated to be significantly larger than those experienced by Twitter, a competitor, which laid off almost half of its 7500-person workforce.
Chris Cox, chief product officer at Meta, first made hints about this change in June of this year, telling staff that “serious times” were ahead and that they would need to “perform perfectly in an environment of slower growth.”
Mark Zuckerburg, the company’s CEO, was far more forthright about Facebook’s stance on the issue. The executive was quoted as saying “there are definitely a handful of individuals at the firm that shouldn’t be here” in an internal Q&A session that The Verge received. In addition, he stopped employing new employees around two months ago and foresaw the possibility of a corporate reduction.
In response to a request for comment, he declined and referred to one of the remarks he made on the company’s results call last month. The sentence reads:
“In 2023, we’re going to focus our investments on a small number of high-priority growth areas. So that means some teams will grow meaningfully, but most other teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year. In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today.”
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