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Meta mass layoffs irk employees, call massive firing a 'shit show' after years of overhiring

(Image Credit Google)
At Meta, the rose-colored glasses are no longer on. The social media behemoth was forced to make significant cuts this week as a result of critics lamenting the excessive growth that sent the company down this path in the first place. The corporation had grown its employees dramatically throughout the pandemic. CEO Mark Zuckerberg accepted responsibility for misinterpreting the financial windfall experienced during COVID's lockdown days as something permanent and for impulsively expanding Meta's operations and workforce by 13% on Wednesday. Despite Zuckerberg's predictions, the company has been accused by some of overhiring and carelessly capitalizing on pandemic trends like increased online shopping and communication as well as generally just virtual living. “They grew so quickly and were so lavish with perks,” Zaven Nahapetyan, a former senior engineering manager at Facebook who left last year, told the Financial TimesHe told the publication that after seeing the number of teams Meta employed that didn’t need to be there and the products they developed that no one even knows about, he wasn’t surprised “reality is now catching up with them.” “They absolutely knew they were being wasteful,” tech investor Kevin Landis from Firsthand Funds also told FT. At the same time, however, the “land grab” for talent Meta was engaged in was absolutely “the right thing to do,” he said. In reaction to the meteoric rise of Chinese-owned TikTok, Meta quickly made investments in Facebook, Instagram, and the metaverse. In an interview from October, Zuckerberg said that he had missed the trend of A.I.-driven content curation that had helped TikTok become successful because he had been unable to predict how people would share videos on social media. Meta is not the only company cutting staff as the economy continues to deteriorate in response to worsening business performance. After concluding his agreement to purchase Twitter earlier this month, Elon Musk relentlessly laid off approximately half of its workers. In addition to Snap, which laid off 20% of its employees in September, this year has seen layoffs at Tesla, Netflix, Robinhood, Coinbase, and Robinhood, to name a few. Even Google has shuttered teams, putting employees out of work. But Meta is unusual because of its meteoric rise and aggressive hiring in a scramble for talent to help the business fly ever-closer to the sun. To put that into perspective, Meta still has more employees than it had a year ago, despite reducing its employment. In a tweet sent on Wednesday, independent tech analyst Benedict Evans, a former venture capitalist, stated that the 11,000 layoffs have returned Meta's staff to levels seen in December 2021. By the end of December 2021, Meta employed just under 72,000 people, an increase of 23% from the previous year. By cutting its workforce on Wednesday, it went from having more than 87,000 employees at the end of the third quarter to possibly 76,000.

By Awanish Kumar

I keep abreast of the latest technological developments to bring you unfiltered information about gadgets.

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