Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, had to give explanations for the 11,000 employees who were massively laid off. The CEO shrugs off responsibility and blamed “macroeconomic” forces and “increased competition”. Zuckerberg had no self-criticism whatsoever with the massive gamble that the metaverse signified. Some 13 percent of Meta’s workforce has been laid off in a blow to the industry, adding to Elon Musk’s layoffs at Twitter.
In addition to these excuses, Meta’s CEO and senior managers have often blamed employees for the company’s problems due to their personal failures. During a meeting last June, Zuckerberg addressed employees and blurted out that “realistically, there are probably a lot of people in the company who shouldn’t be here.” Over the next month, the company’s head of engineering and remote presence, Maher Saba, asked managers to identify and eliminate workers who were not doing their part.
Meta, with the wrong look
Maher Saba, in another look at personnel, expressed that “if a direct subordinate is stagnating or underperforming, they are not what we need; they are failing the company.” Everything seems to indicate that the company’s top management thinks that some lazy engineer is causing them to fail. Several people believed in the possibility of an Internet future based on the metaverse. The firm, owned by the most important social networks, joined the belief that the technology sector was moving permanently online.
Particularly from the years that were marked by the pandemic. Given this management and brand approach, more than 40,000 employees were aggressively hired between 2020 and 2021. In this way, the company’s workforce was increased to approximately 87,000 workers by 2022.
False steps
Once Meta decided to eliminate the “bad apples”, its share price had fallen sharply. Especially when compared to the maximum it had reached the previous year. This is where the bet on the metaverse and the rapid emergence of TikTok came together as a growing competition. At this point, fears of a coming recession as a consequence of the pandemic surfaced. Another aspect that cannot be ignored is Apple’s decision to modify its privacy policy. This hurt businesses with targeted ads, which had Facebook delivering its first decline in total users.
The only point, of those mentioned above, where Zuckerberg made a criticism in retrospect, has to do with the changing macroeconomic environment. At this point, Meta’s CEO admitted that he was overly optimistic in predicting the future of the industry. Betting more than $15 billion based on their faith, at a high loss, beats any group of under-productive workers.
