Meta, the corporate owner of Facebook and Instagram, March 14 disclosed it plans to cut 10,000 jobs companywide, which follows 11,000 layoffs announced last November. The company also plans to eliminate 5,000 existing job listings.
Company founder/CEO Jeff Zuckerberg, who announced the cuts in a Facebook post, characterized the move as part of an ongoing “Year of Efficiency” corporate strategy aimed at combating the eroding advertising market and global economic situation.
Zuckerberg said the revised strategy included canceling projects that are duplicative or lower priority and making every business unit as lean as possible. The cuts are expected to take effect across Meta’s tech groups in late April, and business groups in late May.
Subscribe HERE to the FREE Media Play News Daily Newsletter!
“This will be tough and there’s no way around that,” Zuckerberg wrote. “It will mean saying goodbye to talented and passionate colleagues who have been part of our success.”
The CEO reiterated that going forward, technology, i.e., writing code, would remain the key focus at Meta. Zuckerberg contends that as Facebook, Instagram and other businesses grew, the hiring of non-tech engineers helped build better products, but also altered the company’s primary tech focus, which includes expanding artificial intelligence (AI) across business products.
“We are a technology company, and our ultimate output is what we build for people,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Everything else we do is in service of that.”
Separately, the executive added that going forward, there would be a renewed focus to have Meta employees work together in person rather than remotely.
“This analysis shows that engineers earlier in their career perform better on average when they work in-person with teammates at least three days a week,” Zuckerberg wrote. “This requires further study, but our hypothesis is that it is still easier to build trust in person and that those relationships help us work more effectively.”