Meta (META) conducted its latest round of layoffs this week, the latest in a series of cuts outlined by CEO Mark Zuckerberg in March.
This brings the total number of employees let go from the company since November 2022 to 21,000.
This round hit employees in business areas such as engineering, marketing, and user experience. Reality Labs was affected, and even those who work in artificial intelligence and machine learning weren’t necessarily safe.
Amid those layoffs, Meta’s daily life has grown more tense and less personal, several employees told Yahoo Finance. All of the employees Yahoo Finance has spoken to over the past three years have joined. Meta declined to comment for this story.
The change began when former COO Sheryl Sandberg left the company in August, said a laid-off employee who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“The culture change has really included this shift from long and medium term investments to short term goals,” said the former employee.
This employee added that internal conversations between teams are becoming increasingly risky as people become more determined to make their value clear. “How do we get [daily active users] higher? How do we get people to spend more time on the app? Are the questions this person said are the most pressing in the company today.
Because directors have also been affected by Meta’s restructuring efforts, the employee said they and some colleagues called these layoffs “the leveling,” a reference to the M-movie. The company needs to increase efficiency with fewer middle managers.
Ultimately, this round of layoffs summed up how Meta has changed, the employee said.
“I woke up in the morning, saw the email, and my boss reached out to me — but refused to take a Zoom call with me, saying we should email.” [instead]they said.
“I can’t imagine that happening when I joined a year ago. It made me feel better about my work with Meta, and I was thinking, ‘Wow, maybe I don’t want to be apart of this.'” “
For its part, Wall Street has rewarded Meta for its cost-cutting efforts, with the company’s stock up more than 110% so far this year.
In its most recent earnings report, Meta cut $10 billion from its 2023 expense guidance, citing not only a decline in employee spending but also a shrinking of its real estate portfolio.
“Our business goals for efficiency are making us a stronger tech company that builds better products faster and improving our financial performance to give us space in a challenging environment to execute on our ambitious long-term vision,” Zuckerberg told analysts. The company’s earnings call last month.
“When we started this business last year, our business wasn’t doing as well as I would like it to be, but now we’re increasingly doing this business from a position of strength. Even as our financial situation improves, I still believe the slowdown in hiring, the flattening of our management structure, the increase in ratio The centenary of our company from a technical point of view and prioritizing projects more rigorously, will improve the speed and quality of our work.
Ali Garfinkel Senior Technical Correspondent at Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter at @tweet and on linkedin.
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