Meta could lay off workers again. Find out why, before it happens

Meta, Facebook’s parent company, is rumoured to be cutting even more jobs in the coming weeks. The Financial Times says that the tech giant has slowed down its operations because it plans to lay off more people.

Meta will likely make the restructuring announcement in March, after it has finished conducting employee performance reviews.

We reported 11,000 layoffs in November, which amounted to about 13% of the company’s global workforce. The company-wide layoffs were the most severe in Meta’s nearly twenty-year existence.

Despite repeated requests for comment, Times stated, Meta has yet to respond. The extent of the potential restructuring was not covered in its report.

Meta isn’t the only company that has laid off employees in the past year, but very few have continued the layoffs after they were initially announced.

If the claims made by The Times are true, Meta would join the ranks of giants like Amazon and Coinbase. Amazon said in November last year that it wanted to cut about 10,000 jobs, but later wrote in a memo to its employees that an additional 8,000 would be fired, making it a total of 18,000 layoffs.

In a November earnings call with analysts, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg suggested the company might shrink “slightly” by 2023.

Meta has learned the value of “subtraction with gain,” which means being able to use technology to cut down on the number of workers while keeping the same amount of work done. The numbers may be what Zuckerberg is using to rationalise his “Year of Efficiency,” which according to a report meant “flattening our org structure and removing some layers of middle management to make decisions faster.”

2019 saw $70.7 billion revenue for the company which then had 44,942 employees. A 26.29% increase in staff strength from 2018, according to data from Macrotrends. In 2022 revenue amounted to $116.6 billion with 86,482 employees. The four-year gap showing 20% less productive.

What’s the bright side of all these “tech layoffs?” People are being (grievously) reminded that this isn’t about them… No personal feelings are involved; this is strictly business.