Meta’s “year of efficiency” is starting to affect the morale of some employees at the company. On Wednesday, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram started carrying out another round of job cuts following mass layoffs in November, reportedly affecting 4,000 employees this time. And some workers took to internal company chats to vent their frustration of the changing environment at the tech giant.
"You've shattered the morale and confidence in leadership of many high performers who work with intensity. Why should we stay at Meta?" one employee wrote, according to Reuters, referring to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s push last year for “increased intensity” to address the company’s challenges.
Representatives at Meta did not immediately return Fortune’s request for comment.
Several employees have also taken to LinkedIn to share news about getting laid off. Shawn Tzeng, a former senior UX researcher at Facebook, wrote in a post on Wednesday: “Along with many talented professionals, I was also affected by the Meta layoff today. I’ll miss my colleagues at Meta and the opportunity to impact billions of people globally.”
“Well, I guess it's my turn for one of these,” Thomas Panlilio, a former marketing insights researcher at Meta’s Reality Labs division, wrote in a LinkedIn post. “This morning I learned that I was impacted by the most recent wave of layoffs at Meta.”
The tech industry is now facing a reckoning after years of big salaries and competitive perks for employees. Meta is among the many tech companies that have slashed thousands of jobs in recent months to cut costs and streamline their business as they grapple with how they can keep costs under control while ensuring they continue to grow in the coming months. Google’s parent Alphabet cut 12,000 jobs earlier this year, while Microsoft slashed 10,000.
Changing tides
Headcount hasn’t been the only way in which tech behemoths have cut expenses. Other measures—small and big—have accompanied the effort.
In February, Zuckerberg announced that Meta would have a “year of efficiency” that included doing away with underperforming projects or that may no longer be as important to Meta’s goals, “flattening” the organization structure in some cases to remove middle management, and using A.I. to boost productivity.
The Menlo Park–based company has bet big on the metaverse, a virtual world, in the past few years. The company’s AR/VR division, Reality Labs, which Meta has poured billions of dollars into, has also been on the receiving end of the recent job cuts. And some of the wearable devices made by Reality Labs will also reportedly be eliminated in the recent cost-cutting effort. But Meta is expanding its metaverse project in other ways. On Tuesday, the company debuted the Horizon Worlds VR app for teenagers (it was only for adults before). The move received pushback from parents and experts who raised concerns about minors not being protected on the platform, but Meta expects to boost user growth for Horizons following its release to a wider audience.
The year of paradigm shifts has come with a price tag. In the last quarter of 2022, Meta racked up $4.2 billion in restructuring charges linked to the mass layoffs (such as paying severance checks) in its first round of layoffs, which impacted 11,000 staffers. But Meta’s stock price is up more than 70% since the start of 2023, boosted in part by its fourth-quarter earnings that beat analyst expectations in February along with other restructuring and efficiency measures.
