Meta hasn’t seen the last of its layoffs, new reports say. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has hinted in a recent internal meeting that more jobs will be cut in the near future.
The Facebook parent company has already announced plans to lay off 11,000 employees back in November of last year, a number that accounts for 13% of Meta’s employee base and is easily the largest headcount reduction in the company’s history.
Now, Zuckerberg is signalling that more is to come, with middle managers at the greatest risk.
The Latest in Meta Layoffs
The news comes from The Verge, which notes that Zuckerberg’s comments in an all-hands meeting put a specific type of manager on notice for upcoming job cuts, in a statement that used a lot of variations on the word “manage.”
According to Zuckerberg, managers shouldn’t be rewarded for creating large teams, indicating that the future of Meta will be as a leaner organization.
“I don’t think you want a management structure that’s just managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who are doing the work.”
This is a bold position coming from CEO — the one job position that is definitely all about managing managers — but it’s certainly understandable. Plenty of big corporations eventually pick up a lot of middle management jobs that keep the cogs of the entire operation well-greased. Over time, those positions can keep growing without tangible contributions, while coming with high manager-level paychecks.
On the other hand, however, the benefits of proper management can be undervalued. And this is particularly true in the tech industry, which was built on the foundation of “move fast and break things” — a concept that values disruption and creation over equally useful principles like maintenance and slow growth.
Time will tell which side of the issue Meta’s anti-middle management stance comes down on.
Layoffs in Tech
Tech corporations are all taking a page from each other when it comes to layoffs. Across late 2022 and early 2023, we’ve seen tens of thousands of positions lost in huge reductions from Alphabet, Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft as well as at Meta. By this point, Intel’s recent decision to cut around 500 jobs looks relatively cautious.
Sadly, these layoffs are in part reversing a surge in hiring from 2021, with women and minorities over-represented in recent jobs lost, according to a new Washington Post report.
If you’re just entering the job market today or you’re among the recently laid off, you may be in for a long haul. We’d recommend trying a tech-specific job board like Dice or AngelList, since they’re less likely to have the scams and bottom-of-the-barrel gigs that you might find on LinkedIn.
