• It is a tough year for those in the tech industry as many companies have implemented hiring freezes, and others have culled workforces. 
• The latest to do so is Meta, as Mark Zuckerberg decides to fire roughly 11 000 people. 
• It represents an estimated 13 percent of Meta employees, with cuts across all teams.

Earlier this month the technology industry was rocked by the mass layoffs at Twitter after Elon Musk took ownership of the social media platform. Now Meta (formerly Facebook) is the latest to implement mass firings, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg deciding to let go as many as 11 000 employees.

This represents roughly 13 percent of the current workforce at the company, with Zuckerberg citing a mix of issues resulting from the pandemic, as well as miscalculations in terms of where the company opted to invest its time and money.

“I’ve decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13% and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go. We are also taking a number of additional steps to become a leaner and more efficient company by cutting discretionary spending and extending our hiring freeze through Q1,” noted Zuckerberg in a blog post confirming the firings.

“In this new environment, we need to become more capital efficient. We’ve shifted more of our resources onto a smaller number of high priority growth areas — like our AI discovery engine, our ads and business platforms, and our long-term vision for the metaverse,” he added.

As for which teams at Meta will be affected by the job cuts, Zuckerberg explains that they have been implemented across the organisation. It therefore remains to be seen which areas of the company will be more impacted than others due to having fewer employees at its disposal.

“We’ve cut costs across our business, including scaling back budgets, reducing perks, and shrinking our real estate footprint. We’re restructuring teams to increase our efficiency. But these measures alone won’t bring our expenses in line with our revenue growth, so I’ve also made the hard decision to let people go,” he continued.

In terms of what employees leaving Meta will receive, the severance package includes 16 weeks of base pay, plus two additional weeks for every year at the company. Added to this is covering the cost of healthcare for people and their families for six months, along with immigration support for those employees that require it.

While this news will be hard for many at the company to take, we must at least admit that Zuckerberg has disclosed the mass layoffs in far more humane way than Elon Musk. That said, we still need to see how the layoffs impact regions like Africa, where Facebook had an established and growing presence.

[Image – Photo by Dima Solomin on Unsplash]