Reuters: Meta is in ‘biggest drop in ages’, according to Zuckerberg
Meta is currently in one of the most turbulent periods in recent history, as Mark Zuckerberg acknowledges. Therefore, the pressure on employees would be increased to weed out individuals who cannot meet the aggressive new targets.
Meta will also hire up to 30 percent fewer ‘engineers’ in the coming months, it appears audio recordings owned by Reuters. The reluctant recruitment of new engineers was already announced by Meta to shareholders in May, but concrete figures have not been forthcoming so far.
On the recordings, CEO Mark Zuckerberg can be heard calling the current stagnation in Meta’s growth “the worst decline in recent history” during his weekly Q&A with employees. Instead of 10,000 new engineers, Meta plans to hire between 6,000 and 7,000 new people in that position in 2022. It is not clear what kind of engineers are involved.
Zuckerberg also suggests that employees will also have to leave: “Realistically, there are probably a lot of people [binnen Meta] who shouldn’t be here. It is my hope that through higher expectations and more aggressive targets we can increase the pressure that will make some of you realize that this is not the right job for them. I like the self-filtering.”
Reuters also notes from another internal memo that the company expects “strong headwinds” in the second half of this year. Employees should therefore not expect an influx of new employees and larger budgets. In the past six months, Meta has already lost roughly half of its market value.
The more difficult times for Meta and its subsidiaries have been around for some time. At the beginning of this year, for example, it was announced that the number of daily users of Facebook was declining for the first time. Government agencies are also increasing pressure on powerful social media, for example with an antitrust complaint from the FTC against Meta’s alleged abuse of power.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, with the Holocake 2 prototype. Image via Meta
Update, 8 p.m: In the original post, ‘engineer’ was translated to ‘engineer’. On the other hand, it is not clear whether Zuckerberg is talking about actual engineers or software engineers in the audio clips. Therefore, the term has not been translated and is referred to as ‘engineer’ instead. Thanks to Freeaqingme.