The Tech Company Brief by Hackernoon: Meta aims to become more ‘efficient’ through additional job cuts

It has been less than six months since Meta eliminated 11,000 jobs from the company, and yet, the folks at Menlo Park say they want to eliminate more. Thousands more.

As part of his efforts to transform the social media titan into an efficiency powerhouse, Meta CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg announced last week that the company would be letting go of a further 10,000 people while closing around 5,000 unfilled roles.

Meta’s reasons for announcing two massive rounds of layoffs within a six-month period are simple: cut costs to keep investors happy and return to the glory days of being a start-up. And while Zuckerberg might think his goal is in sight now that he’s decided to let go of even more people, a report from Insider indicates otherwise.

Essentially, by laying off so many people back to back, Zuckerberg is creating a highly unproductive environment in the workplace since layoffs “distract workers, crimp innovation, and eviscerate morale,” particularly considering that Zuckerberg hasn’t specified the manner in which the layoffs would take place or the teams that would be impacted the most. Instead, what we get is a tentative timeline:

“We expect to announce restructurings and layoffs in our tech groups in late April, and then our business groups in late May. In a small number of cases, it may take through the end of the year to complete these changes. Our timelines for international teams will also look different, and local leaders will follow up with more details,” Zuckerberg told employees.

“Zuckerberg’s plan is misguided,” Insider said. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, what Zuckerberg could be doing is creating a new company from the ground up that focuses on everything Meta can’t achieve in its current state, the report suggested.

This isn’t the first time experts have proposed that Zuckerberg take his ideas elsewhere. Everything was going fine at Facebook before Zuckerberg decided to pivot the company towards the metaverse in hopes of popularizing nascent technology. That bet didn’t pay off, with Meta losing billions of dollars in both value and profit. Naturally, investors weren’t happy, with calls for Zuckerberg to step down and let someone else take over.

“Mark Zuckerberg needs to step down as CEO of Meta, let someone else come in and fix Facebook, and start his own metaverse company on the side,” business journalist Linette Lopez opined last year.

Ironically, despite knowing full well that his bet on the metaverse isn’t paying off, Zuckerberg is adamant that his company will continue investing in the technology (?) because it sees “significant long-term opportunities” in the space.

Meta’s Facebook and Instagram ranked #1 and #2 this week on HackerNoon’s Tech Company Rankings, respectively.

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In Other News.. 📰

• Meta rolled out its subscription service in the U.S.
• Humane Inc, a start-up founded by former Apple employees, raised another $100 million — yet, no one knows what it’s building.
• Uh.. China’s entered the AI space with its own chatbot: Ernie.
• Microsoft isn’t the only company baking AI into its products. Digital payment processing company Stripe said it would start doing the same.

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This article was originally published by Sheharyar Khan on Hackernoon.