Mark Zuckerberg Takes Out The Guillotine: Fires More Than 11 Thousand Meta Employees

You are having an extremely complicated day Goal this November 9, since as many media and rumors anticipated, mark zuckerberg made effective the dismissal of more than 11 thousand employees, which adds up to almost 13 percent of the company’s workforce.

“I have decided to reduce the size of our team by approximately 13% and let go of more than 11,000 of our talented employees. We are also taking a number of additional steps to become a more agile and efficient company by cutting discretionary spending and extending our hiring freeze through Q1.

I want to take responsibility for these decisions and how we got here. I know this is hard for everyone, and I’m especially sorry to those affected,” were the first words of a troubled Meta CEO.

The explanation and justification for the dismissals:

“At the start of Covid, the world moved rapidly online and the rise of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. Many people predicted that this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic was over. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not turn out the way I had hoped. Not only has online trading returned to previous trends, but the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and loss of ad signals have caused our revenue to be much lower than I expected. I was wrong, and I take responsibility for that.

In this new environment, we need to be more efficient in terms of capital. We’ve shifted more of our resources to fewer high-priority growth areas, like our AI discovery engine, our ads and trading platforms, and our long-term vision for the metaverse. We’ve cut costs across our business, including cutting budgets, cutting profits, and reducing our real estate footprint. We are restructuring teams to increase our efficiency. But these measures alone will not bring our spending in line with our revenue growth, which is why I have also made the difficult decision to let people go.”

Other measures to reduce expenses in Meta

“Overall, this will add up to a significant cultural shift in the way we operate. For example, as we reduce our real estate footprint, we’re transitioning to desk sharing for people who already spend most of their time away from the office. We’ll be rolling out more cost-cutting changes like this in the coming months.

We are also extending our hiring freeze through Q1 with a small number of exceptions. I will look at our business performance, operating efficiency and other macroeconomic factors to determine if and how much we should resume hiring at that time. This will give us the ability to control our cost structure in the event of a continued economic downturn. It will also put us on the path to achieving a more efficient cost structure than the one we outlined to investors recently.

I am currently in the midst of a comprehensive review of our infrastructure spending. As we build our AI infrastructure, we are focused on becoming even more efficient with our capacity. Our infrastructure will continue to be an important advantage for Meta, and I think we can achieve this while spending less.

Fundamentally, we are making all of these changes for two reasons: our revenue outlook is lower than we expected at the beginning of this year, and we want to ensure that we are operating efficiently in both Family of Apps and Reality Labs.”