The tech industry has laid off nearly 290,000 workers since the beginning of 2022.
Facebook parent Meta Platforms said Tuesday it would cut 10,000 jobs, the first Big Tech company to announce a second round of mass layoffs as the industry braces for a deep economic downturn.
Facebook-parent Meta Platforms said Tuesday it would cut 10,000 jobs, the first Big Tech company to announce a second round of mass layoffs as the industry braces for a deep economic downturn.
Meta shares jumped 6 per cent on the news. The widely anticipated job cuts are part of a broader restructuring that will also see the company cancel hiring plans for 5,000 openings, cancel low-priority projects and flatten layers of middle management.
“I think we must prepare ourselves for the possibility that this new economic reality will continue for many years,” Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said in a message to employees.
Concerns of an economic recession due to rising interest rates have led to a series of massive job cuts in corporate America: from Wall Street banks such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to large tech firms including Amazon.com and Microsoft.
Meta, which is pouring billions of dollars into building a futuristic metaverse, is grappling with a post-pandemic slump in ad spending from companies worried about the economic outlook.
In response, Zuckerberg has promised to turn 2023 into the “Year of Efficiency”. With the latest move, Meta expects spending in 2023 to fall between $86 billion and $92 billion, down from an earlier forecast of $89 billion to $95 billion.
Zuckerberg said Meta would remove multiple layers of management, asking managers to become individual contributors and giving them fewer than 10 direct reports, which in turn would “flatter” the organization.
“While we don’t expect to grow the workforce any time soon, it makes more sense to fully utilize each manager’s capacity and defragment layers as much as possible,” he said.
Meta’s move to cut its workforce by 11,000 in November marked the first mass layoff in its 18-year history. It plans to have a workforce of 86,482 by the end of 2022, a 20% increase from a year ago.
According to layoff-tracking site Layoffs.fi, the tech industry is set to lay off about 290,000 workers through the beginning of 2022, with about 40% of those coming this year.
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(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed)
