Meta to lay off 10,000 more staff

Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg announced the fresh round of cuts in a Facebook post on Tuesday.

It will be the second series of mass redundancies from Meta, which owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, which laid off 11,000 employees in November last year.

The restructuring will also see a further 5,000 unfilled job adverts closed without hiring.

“This will be tough and there’s no way around that,” Zuckerberg wrote.

“Over the next couple of months, org leaders will announce restructuring plans focused on flattening our orgs, canceling lower priority projects, and reducing our hiring rates.”

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The end goal of the restructure is “to improve organisational efficiency, dramatically increase developer productivity and tooling, optimise distributed work, garbage collect unnecessary processes, and more”. 

Restructuring and layoffs in Meta’s tech groups are expected in late April and in business groups in late May.

He also hinted at a reversal of the company’s moves to promote engineers working from anywhere they want. 

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“Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote or remained in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely,” he said.

“Engineers earlier in their career perform better on average when they work in-person with teammates at least three days a week. I encourage all of you to find more opportunities to work with your colleagues in person.”

He added: “A leaner org will execute its highest priorities faster.

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“People will be more productive, and their work will be more fun and fulfilling. We will become an even greater magnet for the most talented people. That’s why in our Year of Efficiency, we are focused on canceling projects that are duplicative or lower priority and making every organisation as lean as possible.”