Mark Zuckerberg’s goal is laying off another 10,000 people and instituting a new hiring freeze as part of the company’s “Year of Efficiency,” the chief executive officer announced in a Facebook post Tuesday.
The restructuring, which also closes another 5,000 job openings without hiring, comes less than six months after the company announced another wave of 11,000 layoffs. At its peak in 2022, Meta had grown to 87,000 employees worldwide, with a substantial portion of that hiring occurring since the onset of the Covid pandemic.
“This will be difficult and there is no way around it,” Zuckerberg wrote in a blog post. “Over the coming months, organizational leaders will announce turnaround plans focused on flattening our organizations, canceling lower-priority projects, and lowering our hire rates.”
Restructuring and layoffs are expected at Meta’s technology groups at the end of April and at business groups at the end of May.
The ultimate goal of the restructuring is to “improve organizational efficiency, dramatically increase developer productivity and tools, optimize distributed work, garbage collect unnecessary processes, and more,” Zuckerberg said. He highlighted problems that include managers with too few staff to oversee and projects that he said are not worth the organization’s overhead to support them.
“A more agile organization will execute on its highest priorities faster,” he added. “People will be more productive and their work will be more fun and fulfilling. We will become an even bigger magnet for the most talented people. That is why in our Year of Efficiency, we are focused on canceling projects that are duplicates or lower priority and making each organization as efficient as possible.”
Zuckerberg’s note also hinted at a reversal of the company’s moves to promote engineers who work from anywhere they want. “Our initial analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who joined Meta in person and then transferred remotely or remained in person performed better on average than people who joined remotely,” he said. . “Early-career engineers perform best on average when working face-to-face with teammates at least three days a week. I encourage all of you to find more opportunities to work with your colleagues in person.”
Meta shares rose sharply on news of the layoffs, up 5.82% since opening despite turbulence related to the collapse of three tech-focused banks in the past week. In a research note from analysts Jeffries earlier this month, more layoffs were recommended. “We believe further staff reductions are needed to offset the last two years of overhiring,” he said.
More than 100,000 tech workers have been laid off in the first three months of 2023, according to a tally maintained by TechCrunch, including 12,000 at Alphabet, Google’s parent company, 2,000 at PayPal, 18,000 at Amazon and 10,000 at Microsoft. Twitter has also laid off thousands of employees, in a series of rolling layoffs sparked by Elon Musk’s takeover of the company in October.
But there were no signs that Zuckerberg would change course on one of his most controversial decisions in recent years: to invest billions of dollars annually in the “metaverse,” a loosely defined virtual world that is so central to his vision of the future that he changed the name of the company after it.
“Our leading work in building the metaverse and shaping the next generation of computing platforms…remains critical in defining the future of social connection,” Zuckerberg said in the blog post announcing the layoffs. Shortly before the company’s layoffs in November, some of Meta’s major shareholders had called on Zuckerberg to drop the project, given that even optimistic projections would not see any profitable investment for more than a decade. Instead, he insisted last year that “our long-term vision for the metaverse” was an example of a “high-priority growth area.”
With this round of layoffs, however, the founder and CEO caved slightly to the pressure, repositioning the metaverse as just one of a series of investments and instead focusing on the current trend in the tech sector: artificial intelligence. “Our largest single investment is in advancing AI and integrating it into each of our products. We have the infrastructure to do this on an unprecedented scale and I think the experiences it will enable will be incredible,” he said.
