Mumbai: The layoff trend has been looming over the tech industry for quite a while now. Meta Platforms Inc has slashed jobs yet again, this time affecting engineers and adjacent tech teams. This is in line with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s quest to streamline the business in a bid to make 2023 a ‘year of efficiency’, as per reports.
In March, Meta became the first big tech company to announce a second round of mass layoffs – it mentioned that this process would take place in three main batches over several months and impact about 10,000 employees.
Though the job cuts were expected, this has obviously instigated frustration among the employees. Layoffs were the subject of the most popular questions posted on an internal company forum on 19 April ahead of an upcoming employee town hall.
As per the media, one question on the forum read, “You’ve shattered the morale and confidence in the leadership of many high performers who work with intensity. Why should we stay at Meta?”
The question points to comments Zuckerberg made last year by urging employees to work with more “intensity” to meet the Facebook and Instagram parent company’s business challenges.
Going back to how it all started, Meta’s first round of layoffs in the fall hit more than 11,000 employees, or almost 13 per cent of its workforce at the time, and preceded other major tech companies shedding thousands of employees after a pandemic-led boom in digital advertising and cloud computing.
With this restructuring and downsizing, Meta is also shelving lower-priority projects and “flattening” layers of middle management.
Investors have rewarded Meta for downsizing.
The company, which will announce its first-quarter results on 26 April, is expected to benefit from a modest pickup in the digital advertising market and regulatory pressure on chief rival TikTok.
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