Meta has warned its staff that “serious times” are ahead. Meta is aggressively reducing hiring. Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s CEO, said that the company’s intentions to hire engineers have been reduced by over 30%. During a weekly employee Q&A, Zuckerberg also stated that the company is “turning up the heat” on performance management to remove employees who fail to fulfill their targets.
“Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here,” Zuckerberg said. Part of my hope for raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might decide that this place isn’t for you, and that self-selection is OK with me,” he was quoted by Reuters as saying. Zuckerberg informed employees that Meta is witnessing the worst economic downturn in recent history.
Meta has stated that the employment process has been halted in broad terms, but has declined to give specific data. Zuckerberg informed us that the company’s objective for employing engineers in 2022 has been decreased to roughly 6,000-7,000. The company had originally expected to hire 10,000 new engineers, but that is no longer the case.
Meta’s Chief Product Officer Chris Cox wrote in the memo that the company should operate leaner, meaner, better-executing teams. “I have to underscore that we are in serious times here and the headwinds are fierce. We need to execute flawlessly in an environment of slower growth, where teams should not expect vast influxes of new engineers and budgets,” Cox wrote.
This year, Meta, the world’s largest social networking firm, lost over half of its market value when Facebook revealed a drop in daily active users. Instagram Reels, on the other hand, are becoming increasingly popular. Cox stated that customers in the United States and other markets were spending a lot of time on Reels.