After laying off over 11,000 employees last year due to challenging economic conditions, Meta has reportedly commenced another round of layoffs this week. These new job cuts will be part of a broader restructuring effort aimed at cutting costs and will affect around 4,000 employees in technical roles, including user experience, software engineering, and graphics programming.
However, according to the LinkedIn posts by employees, Meta has laid off many gameplay programmers from the Reality Labs unit, which focuses on augmented and virtual reality experiences. This indicates that the company is scaling down its investments in the platform, which has been struggling to gain traction and attract users.
“I woke up this morning to the unfortunate news that I was one of the many laid-off from Meta today,” a Facebook business program manager wrote on LinkedIn.
Lori Goler, Meta’s head of people, acknowledged that saying goodbye to friends and colleagues who have contributed so much to Meta is difficult. And to help employees process the news, the company has asked North American employees, whose jobs allow it, to work from home on Wednesday.
More layoffs in the coming months
While the current layoffs focused on product-facing teams, reports suggest Meta plans to cut business-facing roles, such as finance, legal, and HR, beginning in May. Moreover, tech teams who weren’t impacted by the current round of layoffs might also be included in the next round.
This drastic downsizing of the company is part of Zuckerberg’s “Year of Efficiency” plan, which came into effect last year. And although Wall Street has welcomed this downsizing, with Meta’s shares up 81% this year, the company is still backing its bet on the metaverse, which is yet to gain user interest. Just last quarter, Meta’s Reality Labs unit recorded a $4.28 billion operating loss, thus bringing its total losses for 2022 to $13.72 billion.
2023-04-21 15:06:49