“Productivity year”
Meta will reduce the size of its recruiting team soon and notify affected employees tomorrow. The company will then undertake layoffs and restructuring in technology departments at the end of April and in other departments at the end of May. Zuckerberg said the process could take until the end of 2023 to complete, but timelines for Meta’s operations outside of the US could be different. After the restructuring, Meta plans to lift the hiring freeze decision.
Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement that layoffs are very difficult but inevitable, and that it is painful to lose talented people, “I am personally grateful for all their efforts. “We will support people as before and show everyone the gratitude they deserve.”
Meta will become leaner
On the other hand, we have conveyed to you in our previous news that a second wave of layoffs is coming. As Meta tried to cut costs, Zuckerberg described 2023 as a “productivity year” for the company. Zuckerberg is trying to simplify Meta a bit to make it run faster. While this is expected to contribute to productivity, it was signaled that investments will continue in Reality Labs (the division of Meta that runs virtual and augmented reality initiatives), which lost tons of money in 2022 to Meta.
Many major tech companies, including Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft, have made massive layoffs over the past few months. Twitter has been laying off staff almost continuously since its sale to Elon Musk in October. So Meta isn’t alone in this, but it is the first company among its competitors to suffer the second batch of layoffs since late 2022.