Recently, Mark Zuckerberg praised Elon Musk in a podcast. The meta CEO believes that Musk changed the course of the industry by firing scores of middle managers at Twitter after his acquisition of the microblogging site in a $44 billion deal last October. According to Mark, this move initiated a trend that has been “good for the industry” as a whole.
Source: Colors Of India
Since musk assumed control of Twitter, he slacked Of thousands of employees, downsizing the workforce from about 7500 to less than 2000 by February 2023, as per a report by Tech crunch.
In the Lex Friedman podcast on Monday, Zuckerberg said that— according to him, musk was right in putting an effort to make Twitter “more technical“ and bridge the gap between engineers and himself, with “fewer layers of management.”
he said, “his actions led me and I think a lot of other folks in the industry to think about, hey, are we kind of doing this as much as we should?“ He added, “could we make a companies better by pushing on some of the same principles?…my sense is that there were a lot of other people who thought that those were good changes, but who may have been a little shy about doing them.”
He went on to say that it was something Musk “was quite ahead of a bunch of other companies on.“
In March this year, Zuckerberg’s Meta – which owns Facebook Instagram and WhatsApp – announced that it would lay of approximately 10,000 imply employees – adding to the 11,000 job cuts it began in November last year. Meta-recently announced that it would stop hiring on 5000 more positions. In a recent blog post, CEO Zuckerberg himself said He would “make our organisation flatter by removing a multiple layers of management”, and called it a part of his “year of efficiency” plan.
Although, the move received backlash from the present meta-employees, the Wall Street responded positively to it – and Meta’s shares surged about 112% year to date.
Not just Meta and Twitter, but other big tech companies have also laid off their employees this year. Among them are— Salesforce, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. Tech layoffs in 2023 have been rampant ever since the tech world took flight 22 years ago. According to a report released in the beginning of this year by the recruiting firm challenger, grey and Christmas –tech layoffs, this year, have been the highest in the last two decades.
Most of these layoffs were simply because many tech companies had over hired workforce in the last few years and mainly during the COVID-19 pandemic – due to the sudden surge in the demand of products and services and also because it was a time of easy money given low rates interest offered by Fed.
Former CEO of slack, Stewart Butterfield, shared his opinion on the overhiring by tech companies saying – “you hire someone, and the first thing that person wants to do is hire other people.“ The reason being, “ The more people who report to you, the higher you prestige, the more your power in the organisation… So every budgeting process is, ‘ I really want to hire,’ and that to me is the root of all the excess.”
Image Source: Variety
According to Zuckerberg, it was the really hard for him to judge whether Musk fired enough workers at Twitter or not, but the move he initiated helped other companies kickstart their layoff process too, which “hopefully can be good for the industry and make all these companies more productive over time.”
In April, Musk told the BBC that Twitter “was going to go bankrupt if we did not cut costs immediately.” Musk took billions in debt to assist his acquisition, which made the situation even more volatile.
Zuckerberg also added that he wanted to “empower engineers more, the people who Are building things, the technical teams.“
