Meta begins cutting thousands of staff

On Wednesday, the social media giant began cutting technical roles in user experience, software engineering and others, according to CNBC.

The publication said that former employees announced on LinkedIn that they had been let go by the company. A Meta spokesperson confirmed to CNBC that the cuts had started.

Last month, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the company would lay off 10,000 staff as the company moves to cut costs in the face of economic uncertainty and a sharp decline in advertising sales.

Like other tech companies, Meta overhired staff during the pandemic as the industry saw a huge boom as people spent more time online.

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

The restructuring, part of the company’s “Year of Efficiency”, also saw a further 5,000 unfilled job adverts closed without hiring.

“This will be tough and there’s no way around that,” Zuckerberg wrote in a post last month.

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“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.”

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”. 

Zuckerberg also hinted at a reversal of the company’s moves to promote engineers working remotely. 

“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.

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“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. 

“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.”

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