San Francisco — Mark Zuckerberg is sending a message to Meta employees.
At an internal meeting on Thursday, Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Silicon Valley companies are facing one of the “worst recessions we’ve seen in recent history.” The New York Times. He told Meta’s 77,800 workers that they needed to be prepared to do more work with less resources and their performance would be evaluated more severely than before.
Zuckerberg added that the company, which owns Facebook, Instagram and other apps, is lowering its hiring goals. He said Meta is now hiring 6,000 to 7,000 new engineers this year, from its previous goal of about 10,000. In some areas, especially junior engineer recruitment will be completely suspended, but in other parts of the business there will be more staff, he said.
“Some people may think this place isn’t for you, and self-selection is fine for me,” Zuckerberg said on the phone. “In reality, there are many people in the company who shouldn’t be here.”
The CEO’s comments are some of the sharpest words he has made to his employees and reflect the difficulty Meta faces in business. The company, which has been financially empowered for years, is in an unfamiliar position as it struggles this year. It experienced strong growth in the early days of the pandemic, but has recently been tackling a catastrophic change in the global economy with inflation and rising interest rates.
Its financial uncertainty is being hit as Meta overcomes the turmoil of its core social networking and advertising businesses. Zuckerberg declared last year that his company, renamed Meta from Facebook, is making long-term bets to build the so-called Metaverse immersive world. He spends billions of dollars on that effort, which reduces Meta’s profits.
The company is also hitting the advertising business after Apple has made privacy changes to its mobile operating system, limiting the amount of data Facebook and Instagram can collect for users.
As a result, Meta recorded a continuous decline in profits this year for the first time in more than a decade. In February, after a disastrous financial report, Meta’s share price plummeted 26% and its market value plummeted by more than $ 230 billion in the company’s largest one-day wipeout. In March, the company informed its employees that it would reduce or eliminate free services such as laundry and dry cleaning.
In a note to employees on Thursday, Meta’s chief product officer Chris Cox reflected Zuckerberg’s sentiment, the company is in a “serious era” and the economic “headwinds are fierce.” Said. To the Times.
“The team shouldn’t expect a large influx of new engineers or budgets, it should do it perfectly in a slow-growing environment,” Cox said. “We think about prioritizing more ruthlessly, measuring and understanding what impacts, investing in the efficiency and speed of in-house developers, slimmer, mean, and more exciting. You need to run a good team. “
Comments on Zuckerberg and Cox employees report Previously by Reuters. A Meta spokesman said Cox’s memo reflected what the company had publicly stated in its earnings announcement and was frank about its “issues” and “opportunities.”
At a video conference Thursday’s internal meeting, Zuckerberg’s comments seemed to come from a sense of frustration, according to an employee who saw the phone. After someone asked in 2022 if the company would continue with its internal name for paid leave, “Metadays,” Zuckerberg paused and spoke aloud on how to properly answer the question. They were not allowed to speak.
The CEO then said the company needed to crack down and work harder than before, and “heated up” the internal goals and indicators used to assess employee performance. He said he expects some employee turnover from employees who have not met these goals and that some employees may retire as a result of the accelerated pace.
However, Zuckerberg said he was reluctant to spend a lot of money on important long-term projects and wasn’t focused solely on profits. He mentioned efforts to build the Metaverse using virtual and augmented reality products over the next decade or more.
Cox said in a memo that Meta continues to focus on investing in Lille. It’s a video product like TikTok, which has been featured a lot on Instagram, helping to improve artificial intelligence and facilitate the discovery of popular posts on Facebook and Instagram. Meta is also working to generate revenue from messaging apps and increase e-commerce sales opportunities across the platform, he said.
Meta’s internal hiring manager said hiring slowed this year after a surge in new hires during the pandemic. The company has primarily hired important positions and played many roles internally, two hiring managers said on condition of anonymity because they didn’t have the authority to speak to reporters.
There are no current plans to dismiss people, the two who know the company’s plans said, they spoke anonymously because they weren’t allowed to speak. On the chat room channel that accompanies the live broadcast of the employee meeting, there was a comment saying that he was celebrating the reduction of “self-weight” after feeling “bar down” due to employment during the pandemic process. To the Times by one of the employees.
