Facebook-parent Meta Platforms on Tuesday became the first Big Tech company to anounce a second round of mass layoffs as CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced 10,000 job cuts, just four months after it let go 11,000 employees.
"We expect to reduce our team size by around 10,000 people and to close around 5,000 additional open roles that we haven’t yet hired," Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said in a message to staff.
The move underscores Zuckerberg's push to turn 2023 into the "Year of Efficiency" with promised cost cuts of $5 billion in expenses to between $89 billion and $95 billion. Meta Platforms, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, expects its full-year 2023 total expenses to be in range of $86 billion-$92 billion, including restructuring costs of $3 billion-$5 billion.
"Over the next couple of months, org leaders will announce restructuring plans focused on flattening our orgs, canceling lower priority projects, and reducing our hiring rates. With less hiring, I’ve made the difficult decision to further reduce the size of our recruiting team. We will let recruiting team members know tomorrow whether they’re impacted. We expect to announce restructurings and layoffs in our tech groups in late April, and then our business groups in late May. In a small number of cases, it may take through the end of the year to complete these changes," said Zuckerberg about the timeline of job cuts.
"I think we should prepare ourselves for the possibility that this new economic reality will continue for many years," Zuckerberg said in his message to staff.
Zuckerberg said Meta will remove multiple layers of management, ask managers to become individual contributors and give them less than 10 direct reports, which would in turn make the organization "flatter."
"We don't expect to grow headcount as quickly, it makes more sense to fully utilize each manager's capacity and defragment layers as much as possible," he said.
"In our Year of Efficiency, we will make our organization flatter by removing multiple layers of management. As part of this, we will ask many managers to become individual contributors. We’ll also have individual contributors report into almost every level — not just the bottom — so information flow between people doing the work and management will be faster," added Zuckerberg.
A deteriorating economy has brought about a series of mass job cuts across corporate America: from Wall Street banks such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to Big Tech firms, including Amazon.com, Alphabet and Microsoft.
The tech industry has laid off more than 280,000 workers since the start of 2022, with about 40% of them coming this year, according to layoffs tracking site layoffs.fyi.
Shares of Meta were up 6% after opening for trading on Tuesday.
Meta, which is pouring billions of dollars to build the futuristic metaverse, has struggled with a post-pandemic slump in advertising spending from companies facing high inflation and rising interest rates.
Meta's move in November to slash headcount by 13% marked the first mass layoffs in its 18-year history. Its headcount stood at 86,482 at 2022-end, up 20% from a year ago.
With inputs from Reuters