“Raise your hand if you know who’s getting fired?” wrote a Meta employee in an online chat group for the company’s engineers this month. “Fire emoji if you think it’s a dumpster on fire.”
In response, his colleagues posted dozens of tiny llama emojis.
“I’m already fired,” added a former Meta employee who worked in the company’s commercial division for nearly four years before most of his team was laid off this year. “But who can keep track?”
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, has declared that 2023 will be the “year of efficiency” at his company. So far, efficiency has translated into massive layoffs. He has carried out two rounds of cuts in the past six months, cutting more than 26,000 people, or nearly 30 percent of his company’s workforce.
At the same time, some of Meta’s top executives have relocated and are running much of the Silicon Valley company from their new homes in places like London and Tel Aviv.
The layoffs and absentee leadership, along with concerns that Zuckerberg is making a bad bet about the future, have devastated employee morale at Meta, according to nine current and former employees, as well as posts reviewed by The New York. Times.
The employees of Meta, which not long ago was one of the most desirable workplaces in Silicon Valley, face an increasingly precarious future. The company’s share price has fallen 43 percent from its peak 19 months ago. More layoffs, Mr. Zuckerberg has said on their Facebook page, they will arrive this month. And for the first time, some of those cuts could be in engineering groups, which would have been unthinkable before the troubles started last year, two employees said.
“A lot of employees feel like they’re in limbo right now,” said Erin Sumner, global head of human resources for Delete me, who was fired from Facebook in November. “They say ‘The Hunger Games’ meets ‘Lord of the Flies,’ where everyone tries to prove themselves to management.”
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, isn’t the only big tech company to rein in spending. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce and others have laid off thousands of workers in recent months, dumped office space, shelved benefits and pulled out of experimental initiatives.
But Meta seems to face most of the challenges. Last year, the company reported back-to-back quarters of declining revenue, the first since it became a public company in 2012.
Layoffs at Big Tech
After a wave of hiring from the pandemic, several tech companies are now pulling out.
- a growing list: Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Zoom and Meta are among the tech giants that have cut jobs amid concerns about an economic slowdown.
- Sales force: The company said it would lay off 10 percent of its staff, a move that appeared to run counter to co-founder and chief executive Marc Benioff’s stated commitment to his workers.
- New parents hit hard: At tech companies that have expanded paid parental leave in recent years, parents have felt the lash of mass layoffs especially viscerally.
- Technology generation gap: Recent cuts have been eye opening for young workers. But for older employees who experienced the dotcom crash, it hasn’t come as a surprise.
As Meta peers chase a wave of AI innovation, Zuckerberg has made a big bet on the metaverse, an immersive online world. But it’s unclear whether consumers will embrace his vision in the way he expects. While the company has sold 20 million virtual reality headsets, more than any other company producing similar technology, it has struggled to keep customers coming back regularly to use the product.
Many Meta workers had already been skeptical of Zuckerberg’s shift to the metaverse. Those concerns have grown as consumer enthusiasm for the virtual world has waned, the employees said.
The absence of many top executives from Meta’s Menlo Park, California, headquarters is compounding concerns. Zuckerberg, 38, is on paternity leave following the birth of his third child, three Meta employees said, but he meets regularly with executives to discuss important issues. (AI is at the top of that list.)
Although Mr. Zuckerberg has motivated base employees to return to company headquarters, several of their top lieutenants have moved on.
Naomi Gleit, an early Meta employee and now head of product, recently moved to New York, joining three other Meta managers and senior executives based there. Guy Rosen, Meta’s director of information security, returned to Tel Aviv, where he lived when his company, Onavo, was acquired. Adam Mosseri, the director of Instagram, lives in London. And Javier Olivan, Meta’s COO, divides his time between Europe and Silicon Valley.
While executives have joined Meta’s weekly meetings via video chat, their absence from the Menlo Park offices has been felt, employees said, especially since Zuckerberg stressed recently that he expected employees to return to the office. office.
A Meta spokesperson said its executives continued to travel regularly to the Silicon Valley offices.
Inside Meta, there is pressure to show that people are working hard, two employees said. There has been intense scrutiny in recent workplace reviews, which management consulting firm Bain and Company is helping. Workers, especially in middle management, are asked to justify why their jobs are crucial to Meta’s goals.
Some employees are trying to look busier, two people said. That has made people more possessive of their work, the people said, which has meant less collaboration with coworkers. One person described the atmosphere as “ruthless.”
Meta declined to comment on internal matters.
While the first two rounds of layoffs heavily affected recruiting and business teams, the cuts expected this month will be the first to affect technology departments, including engineers, which has surprised employees, Four employees said they were not authorized to speak to reporters. Experts expect the engineering cuts to affect teams inside WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook, they said.
In one of his regular question-and-answer sessions with employees this year, Zuckerberg said there was no “perfect way to do” layoffs and that he wanted to blunder and provide more information about upcoming layoffs as news. of the cuts began to leak to the press. The information previously reported at the meeting
Meta employees have created memes and inside jokes about how much time workers have left. In messaging groups and workplace chats in recent weeks, they have been using skull-and-bones emojis to signal to each other that they may be part of the layoffs, according to screenshots seen by The Times.
Those who remain have complained about reduced bonuses and perks. An engineer created a bot that would automatically calculate the loss in value of Meta shares held by employees, part of their compensation package.
The company is also cutting some of its lavish perks, once considered necessary to attract top talent. Last year, Meta ended its free laundry service for employees and moved up dinner service until late at night, a way to reduce the burden of free take-out food for workers.
Workers complained in internal chat rooms that the company was cutting services. One was frustrated that there was no more cereal in the worker’s office, and that the snacks in “micro-kitchensThey weren’t restocking as regularly. Many believed that cafeteria options had gone downhill.
Employee travel expenses are also being scrutinized more closely and workers have been asked to reduce non-essential travel.
At WhatsApp, Meta’s popular messaging product, experts anticipate fewer cuts and structural changes on the business side than the rest of the company, two current employees said. Zuckerberg wants to increase the cadence of delivering new revenue-generating features at WhatsApp, which he bought nine years ago for $19 billion.
While employees complain they don’t hear enough from Mr. Zuckerberg, he still surprised some this year when he participated in a discussion group for Metamates, as employees are called.
The workers were gossiping about a recent news article that mentioned the return of Sergey Brin and Larry Page to Google to help with the company’s artificial intelligence strategy, said two employees who witnessed the exchange. One worker joked about how the return of the founders could inspire Zuckerberg to go back to coding at Facebook.
Zuckerberg later responded to the employees, who were unaware that he was lurking in the discussion.
“I never left,” he wrote.
