Most tech companies thought the sales boom of 2020 and 2021 would continue indefinitely, and they went on a rampage to hire more staff. When mid-2022 arrived and they saw that the economy was entering a crisis, they put on the brakes and at the end of the year they began to fire something faster than they hired. In the case of Meta, it already announced in November of last year that it would lay off 11,000 employees, and now Zuckerberg has announced in an internal memo that he is laying off another 10,000.
As part of the personnel cuts it is making, Meta is also going to withdraw job offers to cover five thousand vacancies, so the company’s crisis is more serious than it seemed at first. The company had about 59,000 employees at the end of 2020, which quickly rose to 87,000 between January 2021 and September 2022, so the headcount reduction brings it closer to 2020 levels. It will leave it at about 67 000 employees, although with no prospects of making big signings in a good season.
Zuckerberg has gone on a spiel about the benefits of facing the future with fewer people in your ranks because he has learned that “less is more.” He does not rule out that there will be more dismissals because, immersed as he is in Meta in the company’s “year of efficiency”, if you want to increase efficiency, you will have to lay off more people. The current process of recovering efficiency will go through “simplifying the organization, canceling low-priority projects, and reducing the rate of hiring.” And with this drop in hiring, a good part of Human Resources will also go to the streets.
Of course, it assumes responsibility for bad decisions during the pandemic, which includes excessive spending on hiring and projects in the distant future that have depleted the company’s resources due to the drop in income. “Online commerce has returned to previous levels, which together with the macroeconomic recession, increased competition and weak advertising have meant that revenues are much lower than expected. I have done it wrong and I take responsibility. He also assumes that the economic situation, with soaring inflation and sky-high interest rates, will put the company’s financial situation to the test in the coming years.
Fountain:
Goal. Via:
Ars Technica.
