Layoffs have become a common trend in the tech industry these past few months, with major tech companies like Microsoft, Twitter and Amazon all falling under the pressure.
Facebook’s parent company, Meta Inc. was also not immune to this trend. Meta announced the first layoff in November last year, which saw 11000 jobs cut off, it also laid off another 4000 employees in April but now Meta is conducting another round of layoffs, which it announced on Wednesday, would affect another 6000 employees.According to the tech company, these cuts are part of the company’s so-called “Year of Efficiency”, which Meta hopes to massively restructure itself to reduce cost and flatten the organization structure.
Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg had informed their employees earlier announcing the layoffs in a blog post, that he would cut 10,000 jobs in two rounds of layoff which would come in late April and late May. While this week’s layoffs are targeted at business roles, the layoffs in April affected the tech teams. Also, the tech company stopped recruiting for around 5,000 open roles. This implies that about 21,000 in total have lost their jobs at Meta, which see the company’s workforce reduce by a quarter since November. Meta initially had about 87,000 employees before.
Zuckerberg wrote in his blog post “Since we reduced our workforce last year, one surprising result is that many things have gone faster,”. He added that “In retrospect, I underestimated the indirect costs of lower priority projects.”.
With this news of layoff hanging in the air, and thousands have left the company, the morale of employees has become low. Some of them worried about whether or not they’ll be out of jobs or not, which if they get laid off means they could lose their healthcare or their work visa.
Meta which had spent $13.7 bn last year on Reality Labs, the department which works on the metaverse projects. Investors are worried about the CEO’s stance that VR and mixed reality will be a big hit for social connection.
Zuckerberg addressing investors at the quarterly earnings call last month said “A narrative has developed that we’re somehow moving away from focusing on the metaverse vision, so I just want to say up front that that’s not accurate,” He added that “We’ve been focusing on AI and the metaverse, and we will continue to.”
Although AI is an integral part of Meta’s AR and VR research as it supports content moderation and algorithmic social feeds as well as other key aspects of Meta’s technology but would AI continue to maintain its status as Silicon Valley’s “Golden Boy” even though the company is still integrating AI technology into established parts of its business.
Among its recent launched projects is Meta’s generative AI coding tool which was launched last month, it also unveiled a tool for advertisers called Ai Sandbox. Meta is futuristically working on its own custom chips as well as a super-computer that would support large-scale AI research. This tool could help Meta compete with top companies like Microsoft and Google, which already have their own similar supercomputers.
