As part of its ‘Year of Efficiency’ program, the company’s restructuring plan involves the closure of 5,000 unfilled job postings
In a recent Facebook post, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta is laying off an additional 10,000 employees and implementing a hiring freeze as part of its “Year of Efficiency” restructuring. This move comes after the closure of 5,000 unfilled job advertisements. This is the second round of layoffs for the company in less than six months, with a previous round affecting 11,000 employees. Meta’s workforce had grown to 87,000 employees globally at its peak in 2022, with a significant portion of that growth taking place during the Covid pandemic.
Meta’s technology groups are expected to undergo restructuring and layoffs by late April, while the business groups are anticipated to be affected by late May, according to Mark Zuckerberg’s recent Facebook post. The CEO explained that the objective of the restructure is to enhance organizational efficiency, boost developer productivity and tooling, streamline distributed work, eliminate unnecessary processes, and more. He cited problems such as managers with too few employees to supervise and projects that he believes do not justify the organizational overhead needed to sustain them.
Zuckerberg suggested in his note that the company may reverse its policy of allowing engineers to work from anywhere they choose. He indicated that an early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who joined Meta in-person and then shifted to remote work or those who remained in-person performed better on average than those who joined remotely. Additionally, he stated that engineers earlier in their careers perform better on average when working in-person with colleagues at least three days a week. Zuckerberg encouraged employees to find more opportunities to collaborate with their colleagues in-person.
Despite turbulence related to the collapse of three tech-focused banks in the last week, Meta’s stock rose sharply by 5.82% from its open following the news of the layoffs. Earlier this month, a research note from analysts at Jeffries recommended more layoffs, stating that “more headcount reductions are needed to offset the last two years of excess hiring”.
The recent layoffs indicate that the founder and CEO has somewhat given in to pressure, shifting the focus from the metaverse as the primary investment to artificial intelligence, which is currently the trend in the tech industry. According to him, the company’s biggest investment is now in advancing AI and integrating it into all of their products. He added that they have the necessary infrastructure to do this on an unprecedented scale, and that the resulting experiences will be incredible.
