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Tuesday, March 14, 2023
JOE BIDEN'S MINISTER OF PROPAGANDA AND OPEN BORDERS MARK ZUCKERUNT LAYS OF THOUSANDS EVEN AS HE HOWLS OR AMNESTY AND NO CAPS ON HIRING BOATLOADS OF INDIANS
Zuck’s ‘Year of Efficiency’ Marches On: Facebook Axes Another 10,000 Workers
Facebook (now known as Meta) plans to lay off another 10,000 workers in a bid to improve its financial performance. This is Zuckerberg’s second wave of layoffs following November’s cut of 11,000 jobs as part of his “year of efficiency” at the internet giant.
Business Insider reports that Facebook has announced another round of layoffs, this time cutting 10,000 workers in an effort to improve the company’s financial position. This follows a mass layoff of 11,000 workers in November of last year, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg described at the time as “a last resort.” A total of 5,000 open job positions that Meta has yet to fill will also be closed by the company. Zuckerberg declared 2023 to be the “year of efficiency,” and the ongoing layoffs appear to be a central part of his strategy.
Mark Zuckerberg Meta Selfie (Facebook)
With an image of himself on a screen in the background, Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before the House Financial Services Committee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill October 23, 2019 (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
In a post on Facebook on Tuesday, Zuckerberg stated that cuts would have to be made to improve the company’s performance in a challenging financial environment. The CEO warned that the company might be looking to reduce expenses for some time, saying: “At this point, I think we should prepare ourselves for the possibility that this new economic reality will continue for many years.”
According to Insider, the new round of layoffs had been anticipated internally at least since January. In order to reduce costs, the company forced team managers and directors to place more employees in lower-ranking categories during performance reviews. It then continued to look for other cost-cutting measures, such as reducing perks and benefits. Within the organization, talk had recently shifted to “the flattening,” in reference to Zuckerberg’s proposal to eliminate the layers of management in his organization.
The concept of cost-cutting is relatively new for Facebook, which has experienced tremendous growth since its founding nearly 20 years ago. Investors have started to lose patience with the enormous cost of Zuckerberg’s metaverse, and Apple’s introduction of its iOS privacy changes had a $10 billion negative impact on the company’s advertising business.
For the first time since 2021 when Facebook announced it was going all in on the metaverse, even changing its name to Meta, Zuckerberg tempered talk of creating the metaverse and associated costs in his message to employees on Tuesday.
During a fourth-quarter earnings call, Zuckerberg stated that 2023 would be Meta’s “year of efficiency” and that he didn’t want the business to be one of “managers managing managers.”
Zuckerberg said that members of Facebook’s hiring team will be informed of their employment status on Wednesday and that other restructuring measures will be implemented by the end of April or the beginning of May.
Since the initial round of layoffs, the company’s stock price has been trending up. Speaking last month during earnings, Zuckerberg expressed his surprise at the cost-cutting benefits of the layoffs as well as the advancement of future products at Facebook. “It’s made information flow through the company better, and it will help us make better products and attract and retain better people,” he said. “That was honestly a little surprising to me — that as we started digging into this, the company felt better to me.”
With the latest round of layoffs, Facebook’s headcount will be more or less where it was two years ago. On Tuesday morning, the company’s stock price increased by more than five percent. Many employees were shocked by the scope of the November layoffs, but this second round has been anticipated internally for some time.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan
Meta Lays Off More Than 11,000 Employees
The parent of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp reduced its work force by 13 percent and extended a hiring freeze through the first quarter of next year.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, met with executives on Tuesday about the layoffs.Credit...Pete Marovich for The New York Times
Sheera Frenkel, Adam Satariano and Ryan Mac report on technology globally.
5 MIN READ
Since Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in 2004, the Silicon Valley company has steadily hired more employees. At the end of September, it had amassed its largest-ever number of workers, totaling 87,314 people.
But on Wednesday, the company — now renamed Meta — began cutting jobs, and deeply.
Meta said it was laying off more than 11,000 people, or about 13 percent of its work force, in what amounted to the company’s most significant job cuts. The layoffs were made across departments and regions, with areas like recruiting and business teams affected more than others. The divisions that were not cut as steeply included engineers working on projects related to the metaverse, the immersive online world that Mr. Zuckerberg has bet big on, two people with knowledge of the matter said.
“I want to take accountability for these decisions and for how we got here,” Mr. Zuckerberg, 38, wrote in a letter to employees. “I know this is tough for everyone, and I’m especially sorry to those impacted.”
The cuts — nearly triple the number that Twitter slashed last week, though not as deep a percentage — represent a stunning reversal of fortune for a once high-flying company whose ambition and room for growth had seemed limitless. Meta spent lavishly over the years, accumulating users, buying companies such as Instagram and WhatsApp, and showering its employees with enviable perks. Not even scrutiny over its data privacy practices and the toxic content on its apps could dent its financial performance, as its stock continued climbing and its revenues soared. At one point last year, Meta was valued at $1 trillion.
But the company has struggled financially this year as it has tried to move into a new business — the immersive world of the so-called metaverse — while grappling with a global economic slowdown and a decline in digital advertising, the main source of its revenue. New competitors like TikTok emerged to capture a younger audience while Meta’s services lost their sheen. Last month, Meta posted a 50 percent slide in quarterly profits and its second straight sales decline, even as its spending soared by 19 percent. Its stock has dropped roughly 70 percent this year.
Mr. Zuckerberg attributed the cuts on Wednesday to growing too quickly during the pandemic, when a surge in online commerce led to a big spike in revenue. He said he had thought the shift would be permanent, leading him to significantly increase spending. Meta’s number of employees at the end of September was 28 percent higher than a year earlier.
“Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.”
What Is the Metaverse, and Why Does It Matter?
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The origins. The word “metaverse” describes a fully realized digital world that exists beyond the one in which we live. It was coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel “Snow Crash,” and the concept was further explored by Ernest Cline in his novel “Ready Player One.”
Some examples. Video games in which players can build their own worlds have metaverse tendencies, as does most social media. If you own a non-fungible token, virtual-reality headset or some cryptocurrency, you’re also part of the metaversal experience.
The future. Many people in tech believe the metaverse will herald an era in which our virtual lives will play as important a role as our physical realities. Some experts warn that it could still turn out to be a fad or even dangerous.
The reduction in Meta’s work force was an attempt to rein in some of the exuberance that came to define an era of success in Silicon Valley. Mr. Zuckerberg said that budgets would be reduced, including some employee perks, and that the company would cut back on real estate. A hiring freeze was extended until March.
On Wednesday, laid-off employees immediately lost access to most corporate systems, though their email accounts will remain active until the end of the day “so everyone can say farewell,” Mr. Zuckerberg said.
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“This will add up to a meaningful cultural shift in how we operate,” he said. The company will focus on a smaller number of “high priority” areas, he said, including artificial intelligence, advertising and the metaverse.
Meta began notifying European-based employees of the cuts during their morning, with those retaining their jobs receiving emails just minutes after those who were laid off, three employees said. As the Silicon Valley headquarters began waking up Wednesday, employees described tense hours as people stared at their inboxes awaiting news.
For those who lost their job in the United States, Meta said it would pay severance of 16 weeks of their base pay, along with two additional weeks for every year they worked at the company. Laid-off workers and their families will have health care paid for six months.
Meta joins other tech companies, such as Snap, that have laid off employees as economic conditions have grown more challenging. While many of these companies boomed during the coronavirus pandemic, some of the largest ones have reported financial results in recent weeks that showed they are feeling the fallout of global economic jitters. Last week, Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, laid off roughly half the company’s 7,500 employees, saying the social media service was losing $4 million a day.
“These cycles of boom and bust are incredibly destructive within organizations because people employed there feel like they don’t know where they stand,” said Sandra J. Sucher, a management professor at Harvard. By rapidly hiring across all departments during the pandemic, Mr. Zuckerberg had set up his company to need reductions in staff, she said.
Mr. Zuckerberg has been telegraphing that Meta will have to clamp down on costs, starting with cutting back on many of the lavish perks that employees once enjoyed. In March, he announced that the company was trimming or eliminating free services like laundry and dry cleaning. He also scaled back free dinner offerings, making it harder for employees to take home dinner for themselves and their families.
Last month, he warned that “teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year.” He added that the company would “end 2023 as either roughly the same size or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today.”
On Tuesday, Mr. Zuckerberg met with executives to discuss the layoffs, two people who took part in the meeting said. Meta had also canceled travel plans for employees to ensure they were available to meet with managers, should their team be affected by layoffs, three other people said. The Wall Street Journal earlier reported Mr. Zuckerberg’s meeting with executives on Tuesday.
Inside Meta, friction has been building over Mr. Zuckerberg’s financial commitments to the metaverse, two executives said.
The company has been spending billions of dollars on metaverse-related products such as virtual-reality headsets, though such products are niche and there is no guarantee that people will flock to them. There was growing concern that Meta had spent too much on trying to realize Mr. Zuckerberg’s ambitions, the people said, at the cost of the core business of social networking.
In its earnings report last month, Meta disclosed that Reality Labs, the part of the company working on the metaverse, had $3.67 billion in operating losses. Reality Labs also experienced its lowest revenue since the final quarter of 2020. The company expects the operating losses for Reality Labs to increase next year.
While research teams working for Reality Labs were affected by Wednesday’s layoffs, two employees said engineers working on metaverse-related projects were largely spared.
Mr. Zuckerberg controls Meta through a special stock structure that effectively allows him alone to set the company’s direction. It also helps insulate him from the risk of being forced out of power by outside investors, unlike executives such as John Foley from the fitness company Peloton, who had to step down after miscalculating the economic effects of the pandemic.
Meta to Lay Off Another 10,000 Workers
It would be the tech company’s second round of cuts since November. Mark Zuckerberg, its chief executive, has declared 2023 the “year of efficiency.”
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, said last month that he did not want his company to be overstuffed with a layer of middle management.Credit...Jason Henry for The New York Times
Mike Isaac reports on Meta and social networking from San Francisco.
3 MIN READ
Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, said on Tuesday that it planned to lay off about 10,000 employees, or roughly 13 percent of its work force, the latest move to hew to what the company’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has called a “year of efficiency.”
The layoffs will affect its recruiting team this week, with a restructuring of its tech and business groups to come in April and May, Mr. Zuckerberg said in a memo posted on the company’s website. The new announcement is the company’s second round of cuts within the past half year. In November, Meta laid off more than 11,000 people, or about 13 percent of its work force at the time.
Meta also plans to close about 5,000 job postings that have yet to be filled, Mr. Zuckerberg said in the memo. Other restructuring efforts include a plan to wrap up this summer an analysis of Meta’s hybrid return-to-office model, which it began testing last March.
“This will be tough and there’s no way around that,” he wrote.
Mr. Zuckerberg is culling employees after years of hiring at a breakneck pace. His company gobbled up workers as its family of apps, which also include WhatsApp, became popular worldwide. The coronavirus pandemic also supercharged the use of mobile apps, leading to more growth. At its peak last year, Meta had 87,000 full-time employees.
But as the global economy soured and digital advertising markets contracted last year, Mr. Zuckerberg began putting an end to unchecked growth. Meta trimmed employee perks. And after the layoffs in November, which largely affected the business divisions and recruiting teams, Mr. Zuckerberg hinted at further cuts.
Layoffs in Big Tech
After a pandemic hiring spree, several tech companies are now pulling back.
Salesforce: The company said it would lay off 10 percent of its staff, a decision that seemed to go against the professed commitment of its co-founder and chief executive, Marc Benioff, to its workers.
New Parents Hit Hard: At tech companies that spent recent years expanding paid parental leave, parents have felt the whiplash of mass layoffs in an especially visceral way.
Tech’s Generational Divide: The recent cuts have been eye-opening to young workers. But to older employees who experienced the dot-com bust, it has hardly been a shock.
On an earnings call in February, the chief executive said he did not want the company to be overstuffed with a layer of middle management, or “managers managing managers.” He said he took responsibility for last year’s layoffs, blaming his zeal for staffing up on the surge of use early in the pandemic.
Meta is dealing with many challenges these days. It is grappling not only with a digital advertising slowdown but also with Apple’s privacy changes to its mobile operating system, which have restricted Meta’s ability to collect data on iPhone users to help target ads. It also faces steep competition from TikTok, which has soared in popularity over the past few years.
Meta is also in the midst of a tricky transition to become a “metaverse” company, connecting people to an immersive digital world through virtual-reality headsets and applications. Mr. Zuckerberg sees the metaverse as the next-generation computing platform, so Meta has been spending billions of dollars on the effort and reallocating workers to its Reality Labs division, which is focused on products for the metaverse.
Yet it’s unclear if people will want to use metaverse products. In recent months, the public has instead gravitated to chatbots, which are built on artificial intelligence. Meta has invested in A.I. for years but has not lately been at the center of the conversation about the technology.
In his announcement on Tuesday, Mr. Zuckerberg laid out a new vision to streamline the company’s organization, including removing layers of management, ending lower-priority projects and rebalancing product teams with a focus on engineering. He added that the moves were a response to global conditions, including increased regulation, geopolitical instability, higher interest rates and a cooling economy.
“The world economy changed, competitive pressures grew, and our growth slowed considerably,” he said. “We should prepare ourselves for the possibility that this new economic reality will continue for many years.”
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