Meta-Owned Facebook Will Hire 30% Fewer Engineers As Drastic Cut On Recruitments Announced: Find Out Why?

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared with his employees that they need to brace for a deep economic downturn.

30% hiring cut

The company has revised its plans to hire 30% less than its original target, going from the initial plan to hire about 10,000 new engineers to around 6,000-7,000.

And it’s not just hiring that’s been affected.

The company is leaving certain positions unfilled in response to attrition and “turning up the heat” on performance management to weed out staffers unable to meet more aggressive goals.

He put it bluntly,”Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here.”

Perform or perish

Facing struggles from macroeconomic pressures and data privacy hits to its ads business, the tech giant is looking at a leaner second half of the year.

Chief Product Officer Chris Cox emphasized as much.

According to his memo Meta has to “prioritize more ruthlessly” and “operate leaner, meaner, better executing teams.”

They are in “serious times here and the headwinds are fierce”.

Recession preparation

So in response, the company has to “execute flawlessly in an environment of slower growth, where teams should not expect vast influxes of new engineers and budgets,” Cox wrote.

It’s not just Meta, tech companies across the board have scaled back their goals in preparation for a possible U.S. recession.

The world’s biggest social media company lost about half its market value this year.

This came after Meta reported that daily active users on Facebook saw a quarterly decline for the first time.

This is an inopportune time. 

The perennial enemy

Meta is already aiming at re-fashioning its social media products around “discovery” to beat back competition from short-video app TikTok.

Cox said Meta would need to increase fivefold the number of graphic processing units (GPUs) in its data centers by the end of the year to support the “discovery” push,

This is because this “push” needs extra computing power for artificial intelligence to surface popular posts from across Facebook and Instagram in users’ feeds.