‘Managers managing managers’: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg hints at further layoffs

IANS

San Francisco, January 30

After sacking 11,000 employees in November last year, Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has now reportedly put middle managers at the company on notice.

According to the newsletter Command Line by The Verge’s Alex Heath, Zuckerberg warned managers at a recent all-hands meeting.

“I don’t think you want a management structure that’s just managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who are doing the work,” the Meta CEO apparently told them.

The statement appears to be indicating that the company, which will make its quarterly results public this week, may sack more employees.

Meta Chief product officer Chris Cox has also spoken about the requirement to “flatten” the organisational structure.

In one of the worst layoffs ever in the tech industry, Zuckerberg in November sacked more than 11,000 employees—about 13 per cent of the global workforce—and extended the hiring freeze through Q1 2023.

The Facebook and Instagram parent company reported over 87,000 employees (as of September 2022).

In a statement, Zuckerberg said the company is going to take a number of additional steps to become a leaner and more efficient company by cutting discretionary spending and extending its hiring freeze through Q1.

He blamed the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition and ads signal loss for the move, saying it caused “revenue to be much lower than I’d expected”.

“At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. 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,” said Zuckerberg.

“Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected,” he had said.