CITIZENS NEWS

Meta's Mark Zuckerberg fires more than 11K employees, takes blame for overestimating company's growth prospects

By bellecarter // 2022-11-11

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the tech giant would lay off more than 11,000 workers, equivalent to 13 percent of the company's total workforce. The tech bigwig elaborated on the layoffs in a Nov. 9 blog post addressed to employees, taking the blame for overestimating the company's growth prospects and overextending investments. "I want to take accountability for these decisions and for how we got here," he wrote. "I know this is tough for everyone, and I'm especially sorry to those impacted." Zuckerberg also pointed to the aftermath of the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) lockdowns. According to him, the public health mandate triggered a surge in e-commerce activity – leading him to project a bigger-than-expected growth in revenue. "Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected." Affected employees will receive 16 weeks of pay, plus two additional weeks for every year of service. Meta will also cover their health insurance for six months. Zuckerberg added that the parent company of Facebook and Instagram is taking a number of additional steps to become leaner and more efficient, including cutting discretionary spending and extending its hiring freeze through the first quarter of 2023. Other reports, meanwhile, zeroed in on the company's heavy investment in the Metaverse that utilizes virtual reality and augmented reality headsets. The endeavor has cost Meta $9.4 billion for 2022 alone, with the company anticipating that losses "will grow significantly year-over-year." The Meta CEO said in a call with analysts that the company plans to "focus  investments on a small number of high priority growth areas" come 2023. "That means some teams will grow meaningfully, but most other teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year. In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today," he added. Meta has more than 87,000 employees as of the end of September.

Workers lose confidence amid tech industry layoffs

Apart from Meta, tech firms such as Twitter, Salesforce and others have been shedding their headcount toward the end of the year. Around 100,000 employees have lost their jobs since the beginning of 2022, including 20,300 employees in November. (Related: Recession or DEPRESSION? Check out how many American companies are laying off employees this year.) Meanwhile, a June 2022 survey by anonymous professional networking site Blind found that only nine percent of tech workers are feeling confident in their job security as news of layoffs, hiring freezes and rescinded offers put a damper on what's so far been a worker-driven COVID-19 pandemic recovery. As the tech sector suffers, tightens hiring needs and focuses only on experienced talents when filling new roles, workers may venture into other industries to survive. According to ZipRecruiter chief economist Julia Pollak, workers at tech companies will also have lots of job opportunities in smaller companies and outside the tech industry, which include healthcare, retail and agriculture. Seventy-four percent of tech workers who started a new job within the last six months stayed within the tech sector, according to an October survey of 2,500 Americans. Among the 26 percent who found work in other industries, six percent went into retail or e-commerce, five percent resorted to working for a financial tech company, two percent moved to health care and two percent are now in professional business services. "Workers will likely have to take less attractive offers than they found in the heart of the tech sector," Pollak said. "But these will continue to be relatively highly paid jobs with attractive career growth prospects, enormous flexibility and autonomy." TechGiants.news has more news related to layoffs in Meta and other technology firms. Watch the video below that talks about Meta's firing of employees following a drop in stock prices. This video is from the GalacticStorm channel on Brighteon.com.

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