“Raise your hand if you know who’s getting fired?” wrote a Meta employee this month in an online chat group for the company’s engineers. “Fire emoji if you think it’s a trash can fire.”
In response, his colleagues posted dozens of tiny flame emojis.
“I’ve already been fired,” added a former Meta employee who spent nearly four years in the company’s business department before laying off most of his team this year. “But who can keep up?”
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, has stated that 2023 will be the “year of efficiency” at his company. So far, efficiency has translated into mass layoffs. He’s made two rounds of cuts in the last six months, with two more on the way; these will eliminate over 21,000 people. Mr. Zuckerberg is also closing 5,000 open positions, representing 30 percent of his company’s workforce.
At the same time, some of Meta’s top executives have moved on and are running large parts of the company in Silicon Valley from their new homes in places like London and Tel Aviv.
The layoffs and absent leadership, along with concerns that Mr. Zuckerberg is making a poor bet on the future, have devastated employee morale at Meta, according to nine current and former employees, as well as reports reviewed by The New York Times.
Employees at Meta, which was one of the most desirable places to work in Silicon Valley not so long ago, face an increasingly precarious future. The company’s share price is down 43 percent from its 19-month high. More layoffs are coming this month, Zuckerberg said on his Facebook page. Some of those cuts could happen in tech groups, which would have been unthinkable before the trouble started last year, two employees said.
“So many employees feel like they’re in limbo right now,” said Erin Sumner, a global human resources director at DeleteMe, who was fired from Facebook in November. “They say it’s ‘Hunger Games’ meets ‘Lord of the Flies’ where everyone is trying to prove their worth to management.”
Meta, owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is not the only major technology company that has slammed the brakes. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce and others have laid off thousands of employees, lost office space, dropped perks and pulled out of experimental initiatives in recent months.
But Meta turns out to overcome most of the challenges. Last year, the company reported consecutive quarters of declining revenues — a first since becoming a publicly traded company in 2012.
Fired in Big Tech
After a pandemic hiring wave, several tech companies are now retreating.
As Meta’s peers chase a wave of innovation in artificial intelligence, Mr. Zuckerberg has taken a big gamble on the metaverse, an immersive online world. But it’s unclear whether consumers will embrace his vision as he hopes. While the company has sold 20 million virtual reality headsets — more than any other company producing similar technology — it’s struggled to keep customers coming back to use the product on a regular basis.
Many employees at Meta were already skeptical of Mr. Zuckerberg’s shift to the metaverse. Those concerns have grown as consumer enthusiasm for the virtual world has waned, employees said.
The absence of many top executives from Meta’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California adds to the concerns. Mr. Zuckerberg, 38, is on parental leave following the birth of his third child, three Meta employees said, but he meets regularly with executives on important topics. (AI tops that list.)
While Mr. Zuckerberg has encouraged regular employees to return to company headquarters, several of his top lieutenants have moved.
Naomi Gleit, one of Meta’s first employees and now head of product, recently moved to New York, joining three other senior Meta executives and executives. Guy Rosen, Meta’s Chief Information Security Officer, moved back to Tel Aviv where he lived when his company, Onavo, was acquired. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, lives in London. And Javier Olivan, Chief Operating Officer of Meta, divides his time between Europe and Silicon Valley.
While executives joined Meta’s weekly meetings via video chat, their absence from Menlo Park’s offices has been felt, employees said, especially since Mr. Zuckerberg recently emphasized that he expected employees to return to the office.
A spokesperson for Meta said executives continued to make frequent trips to the Silicon Valley offices.
There is pressure within Meta to show that people are working hard, according to two employees. There has been intensive research into recent workplace assessments. Employees, especially middle management, are asked to justify why their jobs are critical to Meta’s objectives.
Some employees try to make themselves appear busier, two people said. That has made people more possessive about their work, people said, meaning less collaboration with colleagues. One person described the atmosphere as “killer.”
Meta declined to comment on internal matters.
While the first two rounds of layoffs largely hit corporate and recruiting teams, the cuts expected this month will target tech departments, including engineers, which has taken workers by surprise, said four employees, who were not authorized to speak to reporters. Insiders expect tech cuts to affect teams within WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook, they said.
In one of his regular question-and-answer sessions with employees this year, Mr. Zuckerberg said there is no “perfect way” to make layoffs, and he wanted to make the mistake of giving more information about upcoming layoffs as news. of the cuts began to leak to the press. The Information reported earlier about the meeting.
Meta employees have made memes and jokes about how much time employees have left. In message groups and workplace chats, they’ve been using skull-and-bone emojis in recent weeks to let each other know they may be part of the layoffs, according to screenshots from The Times.
Those who remain have complained about reduced bonuses and benefits. One engineer created a bot that automatically calculates the loss of value of employees’ Meta Shares as part of their compensation package.
The cuts include cutting back Meta’s real estate. The company has terminated office leases throughout the Bay Area, including space in San Francisco, Fremont, Sunnyvale and Menlo Park, according to two people familiar with the cuts. In February, the company announced it would pay to terminate leases early and terminate Meta’s real estate contracts in some areas.
The company is also cutting back on some of its lavish benefits, once deemed necessary to attract top talent. Last year, Meta ended free laundry service for employees and moved dinner service later in the evening — a way to prevent employees from loading up on free food to take home.
Employees complained in internal chat rooms that the company was cutting back on amenities. One of them was frustrated that there were no more cereals in the employee’s office and that snacks in “micro kitchens” weren’t replenished as regularly. Many believed that cafeteria options had gone downhill.
Employee travel costs are also being scrutinized more closely and employees have been asked to reduce non-essential travel.
At WhatsApp, Meta’s popular messaging product, insiders expect fewer budget cuts and structural changes on the business side than the rest of the company, two current employees said. Mr. Zuckerberg wants to increase the speed of delivering new, revenue-generating features in WhatsApp, which he bought nine years ago for $19 billion.
While employees complain they don’t hear enough from Mr. Zuckerberg, he surprised some this year when he joined a discussion group for Metamates, the name given to employees.
Employees gossiped about a recent news article noting that Sergey Brin and Larry Page had returned to Google to help with the company’s artificial intelligence strategy, two employees who witnessed the exchange said. One employee joked how the return of the founders could inspire Mr. Zuckerberg to return to coding at Facebook.
Later, Mr. Zuckerberg replied to the employees, who were unaware that he was lurking in the discussion.
“I never left,” he wrote.
