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    Meta, Facebook’s Parent, to Lay Off Another 10,000 Workers

    It would be the tech company’s second round of cuts since November. Mark Zuckerberg, its chief executive, has declared 2023 the “year of efficiency.”Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, said on Tuesday that it planned to lay off about 10,000 employees, or roughly 13 percent of its work force, the latest move to hew to what the company’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has called a “year of efficiency.”The layoffs will affect Meta’s recruiting team this week, with a restructuring of its tech and business groups to come in April and May, Mr. Zuckerberg said in a memo posted on the company’s website. The announcement is the company’s second round of cuts within the past half year. In November, Meta laid off more than 11,000 people, or about 13 percent of its work force at the time.Meta also plans to close about 5,000 job postings that have yet to be filled, Mr. Zuckerberg said in the memo. Other restructuring efforts include a plan to wrap up this summer an analysis of Meta’s hybrid return-to-office model, which it began testing last March.“This will be tough and there’s no way around that,” he wrote.Meta’s stock rose more than 7 percent by the close of trading on Tuesday.Mr. Zuckerberg is culling employees after years of hiring at a breakneck pace. His company gobbled up workers as its family of apps, which also includes WhatsApp, became popular worldwide. The coronavirus pandemic also supercharged the use of mobile apps, leading to more growth. At its peak last year, Meta had 87,000 full-time employees.But as the global economy soured, and digital advertising markets contracted last year, Mr. Zuckerberg began putting an end to unchecked growth. Meta trimmed employee perks. And after the layoffs in November, which largely affected the business divisions and recruiting teams, Mr. Zuckerberg hinted at further cuts.On an earnings call in February, the chief executive said he did not want the company to be overstuffed with a layer of middle management, or “managers managing managers.” He said he took responsibility for last year’s layoffs, blaming his zeal for staffing up on the surge of use early in the pandemic.Meta’s layoffs are part of a wave of job cuts from the biggest tech companies. In recent months, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce and others have also said they are trimming their ranks, and some of the companies have increased the number of people they are letting go after initial announcements. Many of the companies have cited a challenging global economic environment for their actions.But even beyond the macroeconomic conditions, Meta is dealing with many challenges. It is grappling not only with a digital advertising slowdown but also with Apple’s privacy changes to its mobile operating system, which have restricted Meta’s ability to collect data on iPhone users to help target ads. It also faces steep competition from TikTok, which has soared in popularity over the past few years. And regulators have stepped up efforts to rein in the company by pushing for new laws that would limit Meta’s data collection abilities.Meta is also in the midst of a tricky transition to become a “metaverse” company, connecting people to an immersive digital world through virtual-reality headsets and applications. Mr. Zuckerberg sees the metaverse as the next-generation computing platform, so Meta has been spending billions of dollars on the effort and reallocating workers to its Reality Labs division, which is focused on products for the metaverse.Yet it’s unclear if people will want to use metaverse products. In recent months, the public has instead gravitated to chatbots, which are built on artificial intelligence. Meta has invested in A.I. for years but lately has not been at the center of the conversation about the technology.Employees have been bracing for more layoffs for months, watching with anxiety as Mr. Zuckerberg embarked on a quest to dial back what he felt was no longer necessary to run the company, according to current and former employees. But the expectation was that he would take a light touch to his favored project of the metaverse.Some Meta employees who were affected by Tuesday’s announcement of layoffs — especially in the recruiting division — felt “gut-punched,” according to current and former employees who have spoken with those in the organization.“People are entering a job market that is the worst I’ve ever seen,” said Erin Sumner, a global director of human resources at DeleteMe, who was laid off from Facebook in November. She said the staggered nature of Meta’s cuts over the next two months was adding to employee anxiety.“There’s a lot of uncertainty,” Ms. Sumner said. “There’s a lot of anger, and there’s the question many folks are asking: ‘How do you expect me to do work for the next two months while wondering if I will still have a job?’”In his announcement on Tuesday, Mr. Zuckerberg laid out a vision for streamlining the company by removing layers of management, ending lower-priority projects and rebalancing product teams with a focus on engineering.To that end, Mr. Zuckerberg wound down efforts on building NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, a cryptocurrency-based initiative that has dropped out of favor in recent months. Many of Mr. Zuckerberg’s crypto initiatives in general have fallen by the wayside over the past nine months as the public has grown more skeptical of the market after the implosion of FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange.In his note, Mr. Zuckerberg added that the moves were a response to global conditions, including increased regulation, geopolitical instability, higher interest rates and a cooling economy.“The world economy changed, competitive pressures grew and our growth slowed considerably,” he said. “We should prepare ourselves for the possibility that this new economic reality will continue for many years.”Gregory Schmidt More

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    Meta Is Said to Plan Significant Job Cuts This Week

    Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, said last month that many “teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year” as his company faces economic challenges.SAN FRANCISCO — Meta plans to lay off employees this week, three people with knowledge of the situation said, adding that the job cuts were set to be the most significant at the company since it was founded in 2004.It was unclear how many people would be cut and in which departments, said the people, who declined to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The layoffs were expected by the end of the week. Meta had 87,314 employees at the end of September, up 28 percent from a year ago.Meta has been struggling financially for months and has been increasingly clamping down on costs. The Silicon Valley company, which owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, has spent billions of dollars on the emerging technology of the metaverse, an immersive online world, just as the global economy has slowed and inflation has soared.At the same time, digital advertising — which forms the bulk of Meta’s revenue — has weakened as advertisers have pulled back, affecting many social media companies. Meta’s business has also been hurt by privacy changes that Apple enacted, which have hampered the ability of many apps to target mobile ads to users.Last month, Meta posted a 50 percent slide in quarterly profits and its second straight sales decline. The company said at the time that it would be “making significant changes across the board to operate more efficiently,” including by shrinking some teams and by hiring only in its areas of highest priority.More on Big TechMusk’s Twitter Takeover: Elon Musk has moved quickly to overhaul Twitter since he completed his $44 billion buyout of the company. But can he make the math work?Big Tech’s Slowdown: Amid stubborn inflation and rising interest rates, Google, Meta, Microsoft and other tech companies are signaling that tough days may be ahead. Some have already announced hiring freezes and job cuts.App Store Battle: Spotify wants to get into the audiobooks business, but Apple has rejected its new app three times. The standoff is the latest in a series of confrontations between the companies.Inside Meta’s Struggles: After a rocky year, employees at Meta are expressing skepticism, confusion and frustration over Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for the metaverse.Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, had added that most “teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year.” He said the company would “end 2023 as either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today.”The Wall Street Journal earlier reported Meta’s plans for layoffs this week.Mr. Zuckerberg has been signaling tougher times ahead for months. In July, he told employees that the company was facing one of the “worst downturns that we’ve seen in recent history” and that workers should prepare to do more work with fewer resources. Their performances would also be graded more intensely than previously, he said.“I think some of you might decide that this place isn’t for you, and that self-selection is OK with me,” Mr. Zuckerberg told employees in a call at the time. “Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here.”Meta joins other tech companies that have been laying off employees as economic conditions have grown more challenging. Tech companies boomed during the coronavirus pandemic but many of the largest firms reported financial results in recent weeks that showed they were feeling the impact of global economic jitters.On Friday, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and the new owner of Twitter, laid off half of the company’s staff. Last week, Lyft also said it would cut 13 percent of its employees, or about 650 of its 5,000 workers. Stripe, a payment processing platform, said it would cut 14 percent of its employees, roughly 1,100 jobs. Snap, Robinhood and Coinbase are among other companies that have announced job cuts this year.Other tech companies are freezing their hiring. Last week, Amazon said it had decided to pause incremental corporate hiring because the economy was “in an uncertain place.” The move added to a freeze from last month, when the e-commerce giant halted corporate and technology hiring in its retail business for the rest of the year. More

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    Mark Zuckerberg Prepares Meta Employees for a Tougher 2022

    In an internal meeting this week, Mr. Zuckerberg said the tech giant was facing one of the “worst downturns that we’ve seen in recent history.”SAN FRANCISCO — Mark Zuckerberg has a message for Meta employees: Buckle up for tough times ahead.At an internal meeting on Thursday, Mr. Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, said the Silicon Valley company was facing one of the “worst downturns that we’ve seen in recent history,” according to copies of his comments that were shared with The New York Times. He told Meta’s 77,800 workers that they should prepare to do more work with fewer resources and that their performances would be graded more intensely than previously.Mr. Zuckerberg added that the company — which owns Facebook, Instagram and other apps — was lowering its hiring targets. Meta now plans to bring on 6,000 to 7,000 new engineers this year, down from a previous goal of around 10,000, he said. In some areas, hiring will pause entirely, especially of junior engineers, though the head count will increase in other parts of the business, he said.“I think some of you might decide that this place isn’t for you, and that self-selection is OK with me,” Mr. Zuckerberg said on the call. “Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here.”The C.E.O.’s comments, which were some of the most sharply worded ones he has made to employees, reflect the degree of difficulty that Meta is facing with its business. The company, which for years went from strength to strength financially, has been in an unfamiliar position this year as it has struggled. While it enjoyed strong growth in the early parts of the pandemic, it has more recently grappled with upheaval in the global economy as inflation and interest rates rise.That economic uncertainty is hitting as Meta navigates tumult in its core social networking and advertising business. Mr. Zuckerberg declared last year that his company, which was renamed Meta from Facebook, was making a long-term bet to build the immersive world of the so-called metaverse. He has been spending billions of dollars on the effort, which has dragged down Meta’s profits.The company is also dealing with a blow to its advertising business after Apple made privacy changes to its mobile operating system that limit the amount of data that Facebook and Instagram can collect on its users.As a result, Meta has posted back-to-back profit declines this year, the first time that has happened in over a decade. In February, after a dismal financial report, Meta’s stock plummeted 26 percent and its market value plunged more than $230 billion in what was the company’s biggest one-day wipeout. In March, the company told employees that it was cutting back or eliminating free services like laundry and dry cleaning.In a memo to employees on Thursday, Chris Cox, Meta’s chief product officer, echoed Mr. Zuckerberg’s sentiments and said the company was in “serious times” and that economic “headwinds are fierce,” according to a copy of the memo that was read to The Times.“We need to execute flawlessly in an environment of slower growth, where teams should not expect vast influxes of new engineers and budgets,” Mr. Cox’s memo said. “We must prioritize more ruthlessly, be thoughtful about measuring and understanding what drives impact, invest in developer efficiency and velocity inside the company, and operate leaner, meaner, better executing teams.”Mr. Zuckerberg’s and Mr. Cox’s comments to employees were reported earlier by Reuters. A Meta spokesman said that Mr. Cox’s memo echoed what the company has said publicly in earnings calls and that it was being frank about its “challenges” and “opportunities.”In the internal meeting on Thursday, which was held via videoconference, Mr. Zuckerberg’s comments appeared to come out of a sense of frustration, according to one employee who watched the call. After someone asked whether the company would continue having “Meta Days” in 2022, an internal name for paid-time-off holidays, Mr. Zuckerberg paused and mulled aloud about how to answer the question appropriately, said the employee, who spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to speak.The C.E.O. then said the company needed to crack down and work harder than it had before, “turning up the heat” on internal goals and metrics used to rate employees’ performance. He said he expected some degree of turnover from employees who were not meeting those goals and that some might leave as a result of the intensified pace.But Mr. Zuckerberg noted that he was not averse to spending heavily on projects that matter for the long term and was not focused solely on profits. He cited the efforts on building the metaverse with virtual and augmented reality products over the next 10-plus years.Mr. Cox in his memo also said that Meta was continuing to focus on investing in Reels — the TikTok-like video product featured heavily in Instagram — as well as improving artificial intelligence to help drive the discovery of popular posts across Facebook and Instagram. Meta is also working on making money from its messaging apps and looking to more opportunities in e-commerce sales across the platform, he said.Internal recruiters at Meta said that after a surge of new hires during the pandemic, the company’s recruiting slowed this year. The company was mostly hiring for vital positions, and many roles were being filled internally, said two recruiters who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters.There are no current plans to lay people off, two people with knowledge of the company’s plans said, who spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to speak. In chat room channels that accompanied the live broadcast of the employee meeting, some workers said they were celebrating cutting the “dead weight” after feeling that the “bar was lowered” for hiring over the course of the pandemic, according to comments that were described to The Times by one of the employees. More

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    Justice Dept. Suit Says Facebook Discriminates Against U.S. Workers

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyJustice Dept. Suit Says Facebook Discriminates Against U.S. WorkersThe complaint, which targets the company’s hiring of immigrants on temporary visas, opens a new front in Washington’s battle against Big Tech.Outside the headquarters of Facebook, which the Justice Department accused of favoring immigrants over Americans when hiring.Credit…Jason Henry for The New York TimesBy More