Meta’s quest for “efficiency” sparked a new wave of layoffs across departments

About 100 people were affected by the latest round of reorganizations and related reallocations of some resources within Meta, three people familiar with the company said. luck. Such changes and associated additional cuts to teams have been frequent in Meta this year, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg stuck to his pledge that the “Year of Efficiency” of 2023 will become a “permanent” part of how his company operates going forward. A bunch of workers in Instagram and messenger They were demoted earlier this year amid other team reorganizations and the elimination of some job titles.

This week’s cuts mark at least the third time this year that increased layoffs have occurred at Meta. This time, the issue mostly affected people working at Instagram, Facebook, and Reality Labs, according to people familiar with the matter. Many of those affected were software engineers whose specific roles were eliminated, but some monetization jobs were also eliminated. Edge first I mentioned Layoffs have occurred at Meta, although none of the details have been reported.

Most people affected received several weeks’ advance notice that their roles were being eliminated or transferred to a new team or location, and were allowed to apply internally for other positions available to them. Some were successful. Some were not. Others accepted terminations four months in advance rather than go through the process, according to the people familiar with the matter.

The layoffs are separate from the disciplinary action Meta implemented last week that saw about 20 people laid off at its Los Angeles office over improper use of GrubHub credits. The credits were specifically given to workers to purchase meals while working in the office, but some were found to have used the credits to purchase personal items or make home deliveries over the course of several months. As I mentioned for the first time before foot.

Meta, which had 70,799 full-time employees at the end of its last reported quarter, has cut tens of thousands of employees over the course of 2022 and 2023 in the wake of the pandemic. Although the company did not see such mass layoffs in 2024, the team’s reorganizations this year seemed “steady,” one of the people said. luck, Noting that Reality Labs seems to undergo a reorganization “every few months.”

While such changes have long been part of Meta’s operations, the new push toward working on AI projects means more and more resources are being directed to AI and infrastructure teams, another person said. The company is also going through the process of “remapping” roles, determining where the bulk of selected teams will be physically located in light of the three-day in-office mandate that caused some positions to be moved or eliminated, the person said.

“A few teams at Meta are making changes to ensure resources are aligned with their long-term strategic goals and site strategy,” a Meta spokesperson said. luck. “This includes moving some teams to different locations, and moving some employees to different roles. In situations like this, when a role is eliminated, we work hard to find other opportunities for the affected employees.

However, two sources said that such notice had not been given to all the people laid off luck. Many people were surprised by emails that arrived in their inboxes this week explaining that their last day of work would be Friday because their role had been cancelled. “Not everyone was treated the same way in this,” one person said.

Many of the laid off employees had been on the job for a year or less, according to two of the sources. Jin Manchu Wong, who gained online notoriety for reverse-engineering incoming features for social media platforms before announcing them, joined Meta last year to work on its newest platform, Threads. However, this year I moved to a team within Instagram that was affected by this round of layoffs. Wong posted that she was affected by the cutbacks at Threads. However, no one working on the Threads team has been laid off.

Despite the incremental nature of this latest round of layoffs, Meta insiders expect more such cuts, either later this year or early next year. Although the company is hiring more employees, headcount remains “very tight,” the person said, and performance reviews are more stringent than ever.

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