Is Meta planning more layoffs?
The tech giant could slash “thousands of employees as soon as this week,” according to a new report via Bloomberg. A Meta spokesperson declined to comment.
Last November, Meta laid off 11,000 employees, or roughly 13 percent of the company’s workforce. For the past year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has pressed Meta’s staff to operate with a greater sense of urgency or leave the company. “Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people… who shouldn’t be here,” he reportedly told employees in summer 2022. At the beginning of 2023, he announced the company could look forward to a “year of efficiency.”
While Meta’s initial layoffs targeted staff throughout the company, Zuckerberg has suggested his future moves will focus more on the management structure. “I don’t think you want a management structure that’s just managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who are doing the work,” Zuckerberg said during an all-hands meeting in February, according to the Command Line newsletter.
Of course, Meta isn’t alone in unleashing sweeping layoffs. Amazon and Google have both laid off more corporate workers than Meta over the past two quarters (18,000 and 12,000, respectively), while Microsoft, Salesforce, Uber, Dell, IBM, Twitter, Cisco, and others have all announced plans to reduce headcount. Like Meta, many of these companies used elevated revenues from the pandemic to engage in broad hiring sprees; but growing fears of an oncoming recession are now leading executives to engage in cost-cutting—and layoffs.
Even as the biggest tech companies cut back on staff, demand for tech professionals remains strong throughout the economy. The tech unemployment rate fell to 1.5 percent in January, according to the latest CompTIA analysis of data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Meanwhile, many industries have experienced strong tech job demand, including professional, scientific and technical services (40,712 tech job postings in January), finance and insurance (30,576 tech job postings) and manufacturing (24,269 tech job postings). Those laid off from Big Tech, in other words, will hopefully have lots of opportunities to use their skills elsewhere.
