Facebook parent company Meta announced recently confirmed reports that it will reduce its workforce by 10,000 employees and withdraw around 5,000 open roles that it had yet to fill.
It is the first time a big tech firm has declared a second round of substantial job reductions in anticipation of a considerable economic decline.
The announcement comes four months after reducing the workforce by 11,000, as a part of the structural resurrection. Further, Zuckerberg previously stated that his company will be focusing on reducing its expenses this year, and has labelled 2023 as the “Year of Efficiency.”
“I’ve made the difficult decision to further reduce the size of our recruiting team. In a small number of cases, it may take through the end of the year to complete these changes,” says Zuckerberg.
After restructuring, Meta plans to lift hiring and transfer freezes in each group.
“Part of our work will involve removing jobs — and that will be in service of both building a leaner, more technical company and improving our business performance to enable our long-term vision,” says Mark Zuckerberg.
According to Zuckerberg, Meta will reduce the number of management levels, expect managers to function as individual contributors, and limit them to less than 10 direct reports, resulting in a flatter organisation structure.
“We don’t expect to grow headcount as quickly, it makes more sense to fully utilise each manager’s capacity and defragment layers as much as possible,” he said.
Cancelling low-priority projects
Zuckerberg also said they are focused on cancelling projects that are duplicative or lower priority and making every organisation as lean as possible. However, he didn’t go into the specifics about it.
Consequently, the company has also announced that it is winding up its integration of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) on its platforms.
On Monday, Stephane Kasriel, who is in charge of commerce and financial services at Meta, wrote on Twitter that the closure of a certain aspect of the company’s operations will give them an opportunity to concentrate on alternative means of assisting creators, individuals, and businesses.
“We’re winding down digital collectibles (NFTs) for now to focus on other ways to support creators, people, and businesses,” he tweeted.
“A big thank you to the partners who joined us on this journey and who’s doing great work in a dynamic space,” Kasriel tweeted. “We learned a ton that we’ll be able to apply to products we’re continuing to build to support creators, people, and businesses on our apps, both today and in the metaverse.”
According to Reuters, Meta expects expenses in 2023 to come in between $86B and $92B, lower than the $89B to $95B forecast.
Image credits: rokas91/DepositPhotos
