Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, announced to his employees a minimum of 30% reduction in engineering recruitment and warned them of an upcoming economic crisis.
Mr. Zuckerberg clarified that the company’s 2022 recruitment target for engineers has been reduced to 6,000-7,000, while it was originally 10,000. In addition to this, some positions in the company will remain vacant after planned cuts; and work efficiency will have to be significantly increased and employees who will be unable to achieve higher goals set by management will have to be excluded. The company has previously warned about these plans and has now given specific figures.
The company will cut costs significantly in the second half of the year in response; to a steadily worsening macroeconomic environment; and multiple user privacy and online advertising concerns from regulators and the public, according to Reuters, citing Meta internal filings. Since the beginning of the year, the company has lost about half of its market value – problems began after the report on the results of the fourth quarter of 2021, when it became known that the number of users of its social network Facebook for the first time decreased.
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Meta reduces hiring plans
In addition to tightening its personnel policy, Meta has to adjust its development strategy: on the one hand, to focus on short videos in competition with TikTok, on the other hand, to continue the expensive work of developing metaverse technologies. The company’s chief product officer, Chris Cox, also warned that by the end of the year; the number of GPUs in data centers will need to be five times the current ones; to power Facebook and Instagram’s AI-based recommendation algorithms.
But there’s also some positive news. Reels, Meta’s answer to TikTok’s short video has doubled in views over the past year; with 80% of the growth coming from Facebook. In this regard, the company’s management plans to set up ad impressions in this section as soon as possible. Other growth drivers for top executives appear to be business tools on platforms and in-app purchases; that will help mitigate the losses caused by Apple iOS privacy policy changes that could reach $10 billion this year alone.
