Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday 10000 more layoffs at Meta in second round of job cuts. Also it plans to withdraw around 5,000 additional open roles that they haven’t hired yet. This announcement was made on Meta Newsroom titled Update on Meta’s Year of Efficiency. This was originally sent as a memo to its staff and was afterwards made public.
The idea behind the announcement are two goals mentioned as: (1) to make Meta a better technology company and (2) to improve their financial performance to execute the long term vision of company. This comes at a gap of four months after Meta revealed its plan of laying of nearly 11000 roles.
Must Read: OpenAI Chatgpt 4 Will Let You Turn Text Into Video
But the blog also revealed a timeline and that the layoffs and restructuring would not be happening instantly. The timeline stated was, “We will let recruiting team members know tomorrow whether they’re impacted. We expect to announce restructurings and layoffs in our tech groups in late April, and then our business groups in late May. In a small number of cases, it may take through the end of the year to complete these changes.”
The announcement used phrases like flattening our orgs and canceling our lower priority projects. This points to two things: (1) subtracting some layers of management and shrink the size of teams and (2) shutting down some projects that were started with a longer vision but in current scenario lost its priority and importance. Taking into note the memo added’ “Every manager typically reviews work and polishes off some rough edges before sending it further up the chain.” To simplify this, he wrote “we will ask many managers to become individual contributors. We’ll also have individual contributors report into almost every level”. This Zuckerberg thinks will speed up the information flow about work between management and people doing it.
The new decision by Mark Zuckerberg stems from the results of last round of layoffs. He states that the things are going way faster than before and that he underestimated the indirect cost of low priority projects. He also explained the chain that leads a company to magnify costs. Low priority projects also eventually need all the resources that higher ones need but with time those orgs grow and become less efficient and responsive to higher priority teams as well. At this point of time the indirect costs duplicate as leadership has to deduplicate the effort.
These low priority projects that Zuckerberg is talking about includes its Metaverse project that has till now failed to generate any buzz. Moreover, there seems little to no idea how the project will generate anything fruitful. This has indeed been visible when Meta last month reduced the prices of its VR headsets. Some experts amounted it to its effort clear out the inventory and make some space for the launch of the new VR headset in year 2024. While others point it to Meta plans to keep its metaverse ideas in backlog and focus on its entry in world of Artificial Intelligence.
Recommended: Meta Puts Hold on Bonuses for Creators on Facebook and Instagram
This inclination towards AI is evident from its release of LLaMA last month. Also, Zuckerberg reiterated that, “Our single largest investment is in advancing AI and building it into every one of our products. We have the infrastructure to do this at unprecedented scale and I think the experiences it enables will be amazing.”
Source: Meta Newsroom
