Meta plans to cut its workforce by another 10,000 people and withdraw around 5,000 open roles that it has not filled, company co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday, confirming recent rumors that another round of layoffs was imminent.
Zuckerberg also said that the company will cancel “lower priority projects,” adding that he “underestimated the indirect costs” associated with these initiatives.
The announcement comes just four months after Meta revealed that it was eliminating about 11,000 roles as the social networking giant pushes ahead with what it’s calling its “year of efficiency.” Combined, this means that Meta has effectively laid off — or plans to lay-off — roughly one-quarter of its workforce since the tail-end of last year.
Facebook’s parent firm said it expects the latest “restructuring” efforts to start in its tech groups in April, followed by its business groups in May.
“In a small number of cases, it may take through the end of the year to complete these changes,” Zuckerberg wrote in a memo to staff that was subsequently published to the public. “Our timelines for international teams will also look different, and local leaders will follow up with more details. This will be tough and there’s no way around that.”
In a separate SEC filing, Meta said that it expects its full-year 2023 expenses to be in the $86 billion to $92 billion ballpark, a figure that it lowered from a previous estimate that ran up to around $95 billion. Much of these costs are down to “cost-reduction measures” associated with the restructuring, including severance payouts.
Zuckerberg added that after the restructuring efforts are complete, the company will lift its hiring freeze across its various groups.
Flattening
While Zuckerberg didn’t go much into the specifics around what types of roles will be eliminated, he did talk about “flattening” the various organizations and divisions that constitute Meta Platforms Inc., which will mean removing some of the management layers.
“It’s well-understood that every layer of a hierarchy adds latency and risk aversion in information flow and decision-making,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Every manager typically reviews work and polishes off some rough edges before sending it further up the chain. In our Year of Efficiency, we will make our organization flatter by removing multiple layers of management. As part of this, we will ask many managers to become individual contributors. We’ll also have individual contributors report into almost every level — not just the bottom — so information flow between people doing the work and management will be faster.”
Meta to cut another 10,000 jobs and cancel ‘low priority projects’ by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch
