Source: The Economic Times
Social media company Meta Platforms Inc stated that it has got rid of plans to hire engineers by a minimum of 30% in the present year. This was revealed to employees by chief executive Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday, June 30 at the time of when he warned the workers to prepare themselves for a serious economic downturn.
In a weekly Q&A session with the staff, Zuckerberg informed them how he considered this one of the ‘worst downturns’ that the industry had witnessed in ‘recent history.’ The Facebook parent company has got its target for hiring engineers down this year to about 6000-7000. This is down from its plan before which was to add about 10,000 new engineers.
Moreover, Meta confirmed these hiring freezes in wide terms in May. However, exact numbers regarding these pauses had not been broadly reported before. Additionally, Zuckerberg stated how the social media giant was letting some of its positions go unfulfilled, This was an answer to attrition, along with ‘turning up the heat,’ on performance management to set apart staffers failing to meet additionally rigorous goals.
“Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here,” Zuckerberg said.
Meta Platforms Inc is getting ready for a leaner second half of 2022, as it tries to work around macroeconomic pressures and data privacy attacks to its ads business. Chris Cox, Chief Product Officer noted in an internal memo how the Meta should ‘prioritise more ruthlessly, and work with ‘leaner, meaner, better executing teams.
A spokesperson stated how the memo was targeted to build on what the company had spoken about publicly in earnings. Mainly, regarding the challenges they came cross, along with the opportunities where they are placing more of their ‘energy toward addressing.’ Clearly, this comes across as the newest forecast from the company executives.
Moreover, this severe step comes at a rather controversial time as a couple of major strategic pivots take place. One was targeted at revamping its platforms around the idea of ‘discovery’ to face competition with short-form video platform TikTok. Cox stated that the company required to increase the number of GPUs fivefold in the Meta’s data centres by 2022 to work on its target.
Cox specified how the copy of TikTok’s short-form videos, Reels on Meta’s platforms had become immensely popular. This was evident as users visibly doubled the amount of time they spent on Reels on Instagram and Facebook.
