https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/met ... 117061.php
Meta finishes brutal layoff round, surpassing 20,000 layoffs since November
Photo of Stephen Council
Stephen Council
SFGATE
May 24, 2023
A man takes a photo at Meta corporate headquarters in Menlo Park on Nov. 9, 2022. Meta has laid off 21,000 workers in the past seven months.
JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images
Meta is laying off thousands more workers, bringing the total number of jobs cut by the Silicon Valley social media giant since November to 21,000.
Workers across the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp corporate empire flooded LinkedIn with layoff notices Wednesday morning, sharing that they had lost their jobs in the company’s fourth wave of layoffs in seven months. The layoff round, announced in March by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, will hit the company’s business division hardest, after previous waves of layoffs focused on recruitment and engineering teams at the social media giant.
The Menlo Park-headquartered conglomerate hired droves of employees during the pandemic, almost doubling its workforce from the beginning of 2020 to the end of 2022. But Zuckerberg announced an 11,000-person layoff in November, then the three-round 10,000-worker cut in March. He has dubbed 2023 the “year of efficiency” for his company, which involves trimming layers of management, cutting perks and pulling back on remote work as part of its restructuring. A Meta spokesperson declined to comment Wednesday.
In March, Zuckerberg wrote that Meta needed a “more optimal ratio of engineers to other roles” and that along with the layoffs, the firm would close 5,000 open roles. Meta’s stock price has doubled since November; other tech leaders like Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Google CEO Sundar Pichai have also boosted investor confidence by cutting thousands of workers after hiring rapidly during the pandemic.
Laid-off Meta workers in the United States will receive 16 weeks of severance pay plus two weeks of pay for every year of service, along with six months of health insurance and sped-up stock vesting.
About 6,000 Meta workers will lose their jobs in the Wednesday round of cuts, the Washington Post reported, including workers on teams tasked with content moderation, policy and regulatory issues. This group is a closely watched segment of Facebook’s workforce, responsible for shutting down coordinated campaigns that aim to manipulate regional politics. Dozens of countries have elections scheduled for 2024, including the United States.
After these layoffs were announced in March, Zuckerberg held an all-hands meeting from Meta’s Menlo Park headquarters. Before the layoffs roiled his company with uncertainty (reports have emerged of distracted and unproductive workers, waiting to see whether they’ll keep their jobs), Meta had already been dumping billions of dollars into a so-far unsuccessful bet on the metaverse. According to a recording of the meeting obtained by the Washington Post, unhappy Meta workers asked why they should still have confidence in Zuckerberg’s leadership.
“That’s a completely fair question,” the executive reportedly responded.
