The founder of the Facebook parent company, Instagram and WhatsApp announces 10,000 new positions of posts, relating to 24 % of the workforce in four months.
by Alexandre Piquard
Ten thousand more layoffs. This was announced, Tuesday, March 14, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Meta, only four months after having separated from 11,000 employees. With this second wave of job cuts, the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp parent company will have dismissed 24 % of its workforce. The group also closes 5,000 job offers open for vacancies.
The timing can “surprise”, concedes Mark Zuckerberg in a ticket on Facebook, but “there is no choice”. The group has, for the first time, given its turnover to retreat ( – 1 %) in 2022, due to the economic slowdown linked to the war in Ukraine, but also of competition from the Chinese social network Tiktok and restrictions on The advertising targeted on the iPhone.
The group remains subject to pressure from stock market analysts, which require more savings: “new layoffs are necessary to compensate for the two years of excessive recruitments,” wrote Jefferies in a note in March, quoted by The Financial Times. In the euphoria – also a stock market – of digitization linked to the COVVI -19 pandemic, Mark Zuckerberg hired 27,000 people in 2020 and 2021, and 15,000 in 2022. The workforce went from 33,000 to 87,000 in Four years.
Delete “Several Management layers”
But, now, to this reasoning on constrained economies, the founder of Meta adds a more proactive discourse, on the supposed benefits of posts. He promises that 2023 must be “the year of efficiency”. “We are going to flatten our organization by removing several layers of management,” he wrote. Meta must become a “thinner” company, he adds. For the group, “to be flatteer is to be faster” and “to be thinner is to be better”, theorizes Mr. Zuckerberg.
“Each layer of hierarchy adds latency and risk aversion, in the flow of information and in the decision -making process,” said the CEO. Some managers will have to take “positions where they no longer direct and become individual contributors”. Meta must also remain a “technological business” and increase its “engineering ratio” in the teams, believes Mr. Zuckerberg. The latter also says having “underestimated the cost of non-priority projects”, which consume resources and “slow” the organization.
We can see in this doctrine the dream of a CEO of a great multinational for half-scale growth to reconnect with the culture of a start-up. We can also detect similarities with the design of the work displayed by Elon Musk during his Twitter acquisition: the boss of Tesla and Spacex brutally dismissed more than two -thirds of the employees and asked the rest of the culture of work ” Hard-core “: all managers must code, all computer scientists must regularly show the number of lines of code produced, it is encouraged to sleep at work if necessary, etc.
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