Despite the company’s strong financial performance, Meta’s undertaking another round of job cuts, impacting various roles and teams within the group.
The changes appear to be spread across various teams, rather than targeting one specific aspect, with Meta trimming down its labor outlay across the board.
Among those impacted is reverse engineering legend Jane Manchun Wong, who’s been a key source of info for SMT over the years.
Wong has only worked at Meta for a relatively short time, primarily focused on Threads.
Meta has provided a brief statement on the latest staff cuts, explaining that:
“Today, a few teams at Meta are making changes to ensure resources are aligned with their long-term strategic goals and location strategy. This includes moving some teams to different locations, and moving some employees to different roles. In situations like this when a role is eliminated, we work hard to find other opportunities for impacted employees.”
So, ideally, the impacted staff will be reallocated, but the latest cuts show that Meta is focused on maximizing efficiency, and reducing cumulative bloat that has been an issue in the past.
Last year, Meta culled around 20,000 roles, as part of its “Year of Efficiency” push, with the justification being that Meta has become too bloated, particularly in the wake of the COVID downturn, and therefore needed to refocus and realign itself with modern market requirements.
The change also came after Elon Musk’s massive staff cuts at Twitter (now X), which many had speculated would lead to broader staff reductions in the tech sector.
Yet, at the same time, Meta’s financial performance has remained strong throughout. Meta generated $134 billion in revenue in 2023, a 16% increase year-over-year, and it’s on track to see similar increases again in 2024.
So in terms of business strength, Meta remains steady, though constant re-assessment and rationalization of costs is also a part of this.
The latest cuts don’t seem indicative of broader concerns with the company, and again, are not focused on any specific area. But they do show that Meta is becoming more focused on its bottom line performance, and ensuring that it’s costs don’t get out of hand.
Well, that is for everything except its VR push, which has cost it billions, with limited return thus far.
When you’re taking a $50 billion hit on VR development, crunching the numbers probably gets more important over time.
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