After wave of layoffs
“Why should we keep working at Meta?”: Employees expose Mark Zuckerberg with drastic questions
Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg has to put up with uncomfortable questions
© Drew Angerer/AFP
The Facebook parent company Meta fired 13,000 employees at the beginning of the year. Now the second wave is rolling. The remaining employees now express sharp words to boss Mark Zuckerberg.
It’s the hangover after the intoxication. The gigantic boom at the beginning of the pandemic triggered a job frenzy in the tech industry. Then the big end came at the beginning of the year: more than 150,000 employees in Silicon Valley lost their jobs. At Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, the ax has been laid again, more than 4000 employees have been laid off. For those who remained, this triggered a deep sense of insecurity, which they now literally pounded around the ears of CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
At a so-called town hall meeting, the Facebook founder had to listen to a lot of incomprehension. “You shook the morale and belief in leadership of many top performers to the foundations,” accused one of the employees in the virtual round, according to the Wall Street Journal. And asked a harsh question: “Why should we continue to work here at Meta?” Zuckerberg couldn’t think of anything illuminating. No company reaches so many people, he argued. “If you want to reach billions of people and have a huge impact, this is a great place to do it,” he said, defending the company.
harsh criticism
However, it is questionable whether this can save the mood. In huge group chats, numerous employees exchanged information about the layoffs immediately after the announcement, and the frustration was great, as “Insider” reports. The cuts have hit employees across the company, from Facebook and Instagram to the team behind Meta’s virtual reality efforts. A team of programmers that took care of automatically filtering out false reports was fired 75 percent, according to “The Verge”.
If the first wave of layoffs could be blamed on excessive hiring – one HR worker boasted that she was paid $190,000 for doing nothing (read more here) – this time there were also exceptional talents among the layoffs. According to information from the “Insider”, even employees who had received the best ratings in appraisal interviews should have lost their jobs. Those who did not have to go received an email emphasizing that their “position was not affected by the current deletions”. “It’s like the Hunger Games,” wrote an employee, according to The Street.
“Where’s the responsibility?”
The fact that there were hardly any deletions in the leadership was also annoyed. “Where’s the responsibility?” asked an employee. “Why does the leadership team get top ratings when they are directly responsible for the decisions that got us into this situation where we now have to lay off 20 percent of the workforce?”. Zuckerberg replied that he was satisfied with the performance of the leadership.
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However, he did not want to promise that this would be the last round of layoffs. “I think we’re in a good position,” he said, according to the Wall Street Journal. “I don’t know what the future will bring, so I’d rather not promise anything. But I can say that we have no further plans,” he said. However, he contradicted a later statement. The current wave was the hardest, he promised. And then hinted that something else could come. “We wanted to get the hardest thing out of the way first. And that’s what was just announced.” That should not sound reassuring for the remaining employees.
Sources: Wall Street Journal,insider, The Street, The Verge