In late 2022 and early 2023, Meta (formerly known as Facebook) laid off tens of thousands of employees. It seemed as if the social-media giant was entering a new era of austerity, one marked by smaller teams, tighter budgets, and fewer perks.
But what a difference a few months can make: Meta now plans to hire strongly in 2024. “We anticipate growth in payroll expenses as we work down our current hiring underrun and add incremental talent to support priority areas in 2024, which we expect will continue to shift our workforce composition toward higher-cost technical roles,” the company wrote in a statement accompanying its latest earnings.
What’s more, the company plans to spend, spend, spend on big tech initiatives, including the “metaverse,” its term for an augmented- and virtual-reality ecosystem: “Finally, for Reality Labs, we expect operating losses to increase meaningfully year-over-year due to our ongoing product development efforts in augmented reality/virtual reality and our investments to further scale our ecosystem.”
Damn the torpedoes, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg seems to be saying: we’re going to burn money until everyone in America has a Meta-branded VR headset strapped to their noggin.
Meta isn’t the only tech giant beginning to rehire after a season of massive cuts. In September, for example, Salesforce announced plans to hire more than 3,300 employees, including critical roles in the company’s engineering and data cloud divisions; that followed layoffs of roughly 8,000 employees in January. “Our job is to grow the company and to continue to achieve great margins,” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff told Bloomberg as part of the renewed hiring announcement. “We know we have to hire thousands of people.”
Other big tech companies such as Microsoft and Google continue to hire in vital areas such as artificial intelligence (A.I.). Remember, no matter what the state of the economy, tech professionals with in-demand skills can find work—especially at companies willing to spend big on cutting-edge, very expensive initiatives.
