Meta Will Slow Hiring, Won’t Rule Out Future Layoffs

Facebook parent Meta Platforms expects to complete most of the layoffs for 2023 in May /John G. Mabanglo. Meta Platforms  Inc.  Chief Execut...

Facebook parent Meta Platforms expects to complete most of the layoffs for 2023 in May /John G. Mabanglo.

Meta Platforms Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg told employees that he won’t rule out future layoffs and said he doesn’t expect the social-media company to hire as quickly as it did before the layoffs that began late last year.

Mr. Zuckerberg addressed employees in a virtual Q&A session Thursday, a day after the company completed its latest round of layoffs. Mr. Zuckerberg told employees that about 4,000 employees, primarily in the company’s tech divisions, were affected by the latest cuts, according to a recording of the employee town hall. Since November, Facebook’s parent company has said it would lay off 21,000 employees, or nearly a quarter of its workforce.

The company made cuts to its information problems engineering team, which helps enable fact-checking, addresses misinformation claims related to elections around the world and can downrank content deemed problematic. About 75% of this unit was let go on Wednesday, according to people familiar with the matter, with the remainder being merged into a larger team within Facebook’s integrity operations that does related work to address false information.

Meta will backfill positions that have been vacated, but in terms of net growth, Mr. Zuckerberg told employees that they shouldn’t expect more than 1% to 2% year over year from this point forward. “I just kind of think that for where we are in the efficiency that we’re able to get from new technologies, that’s probably the right model to expect going forward and that will be a different operating model and I think we can do it well,” Mr. Zuckerberg said.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he was happy with executive performance in new and expanded roles / David Paul Morris.

A Meta spokesman said in a statement, “We remain focused on advancing our industry-leading integrity efforts and continue to invest in teams and technologies to protect our community.” While the cuts were generally broad, they appear to have been relatively light within Reality Labs, the division responsible for virtual and augmented reality. 

Conversely, the company made far-steeper staff reductions in portions of Meta devoted to content quality and user experience. During the town hall, scores of employees took issue with high performance reviews—and bonuses—handed out to the tight circle of executives surrounding Zuckerberg.

“Why did the entire executive team get EE/GE ratings when they are also directly responsible for the choices that led to us needing to lay off 20+% of the company? Where is the accountability?” asked one employee, a question that numerous others posted in the comments section. EE and GE are abbreviations for top-tier performance reviews at Meta.

Mr. Zuckerberg responded by saying he was happy with the executives’ performance in new and expanded roles. Other employees took issue with the extent of the layoffs in Meta’s user experience research operation, which studies how people use Meta’s services and how its products affect users. 

In response, Meta Chief Product Officer Chris Cox said that the company had appreciated the efforts of the laid-off staffers and would continue to work on such concerns. Mr. Zuckerberg told employees that the company expects to complete most of the layoffs for 2023 in May, as he had previously announced in March, but he also said that it is hard to predict what will happen in 2024, 2025 and beyond.

“I generally feel good about the position here, but just given the volatility, I don’t want to kind of promise that there won’t be future things in the future,” he said. “What I can say is that there’s nothing that we’re planning now, and if we do something, it’ll be sort of on that time frame.”

Mr. Zuckerberg said that the round of layoffs this week was “always going to be the most difficult and controversial one.” “I wanted to front-load it as early in the year as possible,” he said. “It took a few months of planning to execute. We wanted to get the most painful thing out of the way first, and that’s this.”

Meta’s Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram and Reality Labs were among the divisions affected, according to a memo sent to employees earlier this week. During the Q&A with employees, Mr. Zuckerberg was asked, “You’ve shattered the morale and confidence in leadership of many high performers who work with intensity. Why should we stay at Meta?”

Mr. Zuckerberg told employees he hopes they are at Meta because they believe in the work that the company is doing. “There’s no other company in the world that delivers social experiences at the scale that we are and that does so across such a diversity of different products and use cases,” he said. “So if you want to reach people in the billions and have a massive impact, I think this is a great place to be.”