To remind Libra, Meta’s Ambitious Plan to Enter the Cryptocurrency Market? Or Lasso, Meta’s ambitious attempt to outdo TikTok? In addition to projects like Shops, Meta’s ambitious plan to turn Instagram and Facebook into e-commerce giants; his podcast plans; Facebook Portal and a Meta smartwatch to compete with the Apple Watch, they all failed.
In his pursuit of becoming the everything platform, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has thrown a lot of stuff against the wall. Very little of it has survived except for the personnel who went to work on these projects.
Yesterday, Zuckerberg announced massive layoffs at Meta: a total of 11,000 people — about 13 percent of the company and nearly three times the number of layoffs by Twitter, which laid off 50 percent of its staff on Nov. 4. He blamed his own decision to increase investment and a tight advertising revenue caused by Apple’s decision to give users more control over how their personal information is used for advertising purposes.
But that only tells part of the story, according to company insiders and people who monitor the company’s affairs from the outside. “Today’s news isn’t just a correction of the pandemic years,” says a former Meta employee with knowledge of the company’s operations, who left shortly before the layoffs were announced and spoke anonymously because his current employer does not give him the right to speak. would grant on record to WIRED. “I’d say it’s probably the last five to ten years” – originated even before Zuckerberg’s Metaverse obsession. Some of the losses can be attributed to the huge series of risky and failed experiments that parent company Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram have conducted over the years, the former employee says. “I just can’t think of a successful Meta app or feature in the past five years that hasn’t been purchased,” says the ex-employee, before perhaps suggesting Stories, which itself was borrowed from Snapchat.
Those distractions from Meta’s core business are damaging to the company, according to the former employee — which is why this week’s layoffs were so significant. If there had been natural attrition as every attempt to innovate failed and failed, the workforce reduction would have stretched over time. “We just launched this massive blockchain initiative that took hundreds of people — or maybe even more,” said the former employee. “When that thing went away, what happened to those people? They just stayed and worked on other experiments and studies.” The former employee cites issues with internal communications that suggested people were fading into oblivion within the massive Meta machine: “It seemed like we were doing all these things that were going nowhere, but we never got an update of, ‘It wasn’t going anywhere. , but here are the actions we are taking,” he says.
New projects helped Facebook quickly recruit staff. Flush with cash as one of the world’s largest companies, and with grand plans to dominate all aspects of consumers’ lives, the company formerly known as Facebook employed profusely. In 2017, Meta employed 25,000 employees. And before it cut 11,000 off its payroll, it had 87,000 employees. The workforce has grown by an average of 28 percent over the past five years. Even after these latest cuts, the newly slimmed-down Meta is still three times the size it was in 2017.
