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Fortune
Fortune
Geoff Colvin

Over 150,000 people have been let go so far this year. Are layoffs a confession of bad management?

Ceo sits atop a falling scaffold of workers and code to conceptually show the problem with managers and layoffs (Credit: Brian Stauffer)

When Mark Zuckerberg declared 2023 “the Year of Efficiency” for Facebook parent Meta Platforms, several questions seemed unavoidable: Aren’t companies supposed to be efficient every year? If this is the Year of Efficiency, what were all the previous years—the Years of Squandering? Is Zuckerberg suggesting Meta can return to profligacy in 2024? 

Most pointedly: If Zuckerberg had discovered efficiency a few years earlier, would the 21,000 layoffs planned or carried out since last November have been necessary? 

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