Meta Reportedly Preparing for a New Round of Layoffs

Meta, the company that owns Whatsapp, Instagram, and Facebook, is reportedly preparing to announce a new round of layoffs in the coming days. According to reports, the company is delaying the finalization of the budget for each one of its teams, causing operational delays and affecting the output of employees of the company.

Meta, the social media company, may be looking to trim more of its workforce in the near future. According to reports from Financial Times, the company has not finalized the budgets for its internal teams, meaning that some of them will be affected by a new round of layoffs.

This situation has caused managers of each division to be unable to plan ahead for the needed activities, disrupting operational output, and even affecting projects in critical areas such as the metaverse and advertising, which are now taking more time to be solved.

The move, which is currently called “the flattening” internally, is also affecting the morale of the employees, who criticized how the vision for the “year of efficiency,” a term used by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to describe the goals of the company for 2023, is being executed. One employee stated:

Honestly, it’s still a mess. The year of efficiency is kicking off with a bunch of people getting paid to do nothing.

One of the key employees of the metaverse and virtual reality (VR) division of the company, John Carmack, left Meta in December due to operational inefficiencies despite the headcount of the company. “I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy,” he stated at that time.

If made official, this new round of layoffs would be the second Meta announced in less than a year. The company already executed a trim that put 11,000 employees, representing 13% of the total headcount of Meta, out of the company. But Meta’s moves go beyond that.

The company is now targeting middle management employees, who are being asked to step down to non-management roles, or abandon the company, according to the same reports.

Despite all of these cost-cutting measures, the company has declared that the metaverse is still one of its main focuses in the long term and that it will continue to invest in this area. As part of its Q4 2022 earnings call, Meta CFO Susan Li explained that they were still expecting more losses in metaverse operations for 2023.

Other tech companies, like Microsoft, have also announced layoffs as part of their restructuring processes, in order to adapt to the new market situation after the coronavirus pandemic.

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