Facebook parent company Meta is reportedly preparing for another round of job cuts in a downsizing effort that could affect thousands of workers.
The jobs cuts at the tech giant are coming after Mark Zuckerberg had earlier assured workers that he isn’t anticipating more layoffs after the company slashed a huge amount of its employees last year in November.
According to reports, the new round of layoffs is said to “disproportionately” impact non-engineering roles and the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg is seemingly deputizing human resources, lawyers, financial experts, and top executives to draw up plans to deflate hierarchy within the company.
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The company reported a 2022 fourth quarter (Q4) revenue of $32.17 billion and $116.61 billion, a decrease of 4 percent and 1 percent year-over-year for the fourth quarter and year 2022, respectively.
It would be recalled that in November 2022, the tech giant Meta laid off roughly 11,000 workers, which is 13 percent of the company’s global workforce. At that time, Meta cited overhiring and poor macroeconomic conditions for the layoff.
Meta’s fresh round of layoffs has been predicted to stem from falling revenue as it seeks to mitigate costs while navigating the global economic downturn.
Earlier this month, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors that last year’s layoffs was the beginning year of the company’s focus on efficiency and not the end. He said he would work on flattening the organizational structure as well as removing some layers of middle management.
He also added that the company now plans to push some leaders into lower-level roles without direct reports, flattening the layers of management between the company’s CEO and Interns.
In his words, “We’re working on flattening our org structure and removing some layers of middle management to make decisions faster, as well as deploying AI tools to help our engineers be more productive”.
The layoff at Meta isn’t entirely surprising after it was reported last week that the tech giant has delayed finalizing the budgets of the teams at multiple levels, due to a layoff plan lurking around the corner.
Two employees at the company disclosed that there has been a lack of clarity on crucial matters such as team budgets as well as future head counts in recent weeks, adding that certain decisions that would usually take days to be signed off are now taking a month in some cases.
Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg has however labeled 2023 a “year of efficiency” as the company focuses on becoming a stronger and more nimble organization. Its belt-tightening measures follows the CEO acknowledgment that he overestimated the boom in e-commerce and had to cut jobs as a “last resort.”
However Meta is not the only company that has downsized its workforce. Companies such as Spotify, Amazon, Twitter etc, have all laid a significant part of their workforce, as the tech sector has been embroiled in sweeping layoffs that have so far impacted over 101,000 employees at 340 tech companies in 2023.