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Reuters

Facebook-owner Meta Platforms Inc has cut plans to hire engineers by at least 30 per cent this year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees on Thursday, as he warned them to brace for a deep economic downturn.
“If I had to bet, I’d say that this might be one of the worst downturns that we’ve seen in recent history,” Zuckerberg told workers in a weekly employee Q&A session, audio of which was heard by Reuters.
Meta has reduced its target for hiring engineers in 2022 to around 6,000 to 7,000, down from an initial plan to hire about 10,000 new engineers, Zuckerberg said.
Meta confirmed hiring pauses in broad terms last month, but exact figures have not previously been reported.
Yahoo follows Meta in testing metaverse tech in Hong Kong
In addition to reducing hiring, he said, the company was leaving certain positions unfilled in response to attrition and “turning up the heat” on performance management to weed out staffers unable to meet more aggressive goals.
“Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here,” Zuckerberg said.
“Part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might decide that this place isn’t for you, and that self-selection is OK with me,” he said.
The social media and technology company is bracing for a leaner second half of the year, as it copes with macroeconomic pressures and data privacy hits to its ads business, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters on Thursday.
The company must “prioritise more ruthlessly” and “operate leaner, meaner, better executing teams,” chief product officer Chris Cox wrote in the memo, which appeared on the company’s internal discussion forum Workplace before the Q&A.


“I have to underscore that we are in serious times here and the headwinds are fierce. We need to execute flawlessly in an environment of slower growth, where teams should not expect vast influxes of new engineers and budgets,” Cox wrote.
The memo was “intended to build on what we’ve already said publicly in earnings about the challenges we face and the opportunities we have, where we’re putting more of our energy toward addressing,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement.
The guidance is the latest rough forecast to come from Meta executives, who already moved to trim costs across much of the company this year in the face of slowing ad sales and user growth.
Tech companies across the board have scaled back their ambitions in anticipation of a possible US recession, although the slide in stock price at Meta has been more severe than at competitors Apple and Google.
The world’s biggest social media company lost about half its market value this year, after Meta reported that daily active users on its flagship Facebook app had experienced a quarterly decline for the first time.

Its austerity drive comes at a tricky time, coinciding with two major strategic pivots: one aimed at refashioning its social media products around “discovery” to beat back competition from short-video app TikTok, the other an expensive long-term bet on augmented and virtual reality technology.
In his memo, Cox said Meta would need to increase fivefold the number of graphic processing units (GPUs) in its data centres by the end of the year to support the “discovery” push, which requires extra computing power for artificial intelligence to surface popular posts from across Facebook and Instagram in users’ feeds.
Interest in Meta’s TikTok-style short video product Reels was growing quickly, said Cox, with users doubling the amount of time they were spending on Reels year over year, both in the United States and globally.
Some 80 per cent of the growth since March came from Facebook, he added.
That user engagement with Reels could provide a key route to bolster the bottom line, making it important to boost ads in Reels “as quickly as possible,” he added.
Facebook owner Meta tells hardware staffers to prepare for cutbacks
Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told investors in April that executives viewed Reels as “a major part of the discovery engine vision”, but at the time described the short video shift as a “short-term headwind” that would increase revenue gradually as advertisers became more comfortable with the format.
Cox said Meta also saw possibilities for revenue growth in business messaging and in-app shopping tools, the latter of which, he added, could “mitigate signal loss” created by Apple-led privacy changes.
He said the company’s hardware division was “laser-focused” on successfully launching its mixed-reality headset, code-named “Cambria,” in the second half of the year.


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Facebook

Meta slashes hiring plans for new engineers by 30 per cent as it girds for ‘fierce’ headwinds

In this file photo taken on October 28, 2021, a man passes a newly unveiled logo for Facebook parent company Meta Platforms. Photo: AFP

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks at Georgetown University on October 17, 2019, in Washington. Photo: AP

Zuckerberg’s Meta to push metaverse initiatives to Hong Kong cafes and schools as interest in virtual world hots up

Meta is going to launch several metaverse initiatives in Hong Kong. Photo: Reuters 

Meta is going to launch several metaverse initiatives in Hong Kong. Photo: AP 

Meta shares surge after Facebook ekes out user growth, beats Wall Street targets on profit

This file photo taken in Moscow on October 18, 2021, shows the US online social media and social networking service Facebook’s logo on a tablet screen. Photo: AFP

In this April 14, 2020, file photo, the thumbs up Like logo is shown on a sign at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California. Photo: AP

Alibaba joins Meta, Microsoft to share low-carbon technology patents on Earth Day

Alibaba will join the Low Carbon Patent Pledge (LCPP) and make its main patents on green data centre technology available for free. Photo: Simon Song

Tencent plays up ‘social value’ of video gaming tech as China’s regulators continue scrutiny of content the sector creates

Tencent Games, a subsidiary of internet giant Tencent Holdings, held its “Spark 2022” online conference on June 27, 2022. Photo: Shutterstock

Tencent Holdings has sharpened its focus on the social value of video gaming technologies amid regulatory scrutiny in China. Photo Shutterstock

A range of cutting-edge game technologies are now being applied by Tencent Holdings to various projects outside the video gaming market. Photo: Shutterstock

Facebook changes name to Meta to stress ‘metaverse’ plan

A woman holds a smartphone with Meta logo on it in front of a displayed Facebook logo. Photo illustration: Reuters

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Facebook Inc., speaks during the virtual Facebook Connect event, where the company announced its rebranding as Meta, in New York, U.S., on Thursday, Oct. 28, 2021. A major theme at the annual conference will be the company's ambitions for the so-called metaverse, a new digital space that it believes will supplant smartphone apps as the primary form of online interaction. Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg

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Meta has reduced its target for hiring engineers in 2022 to around 6,000 to 7,000, down from an initial plan to hire about 10,000, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said
The Facebook owner seeks to ‘operate leaner, meaner, better executing teams’, raising expectations to force a ‘self-selection’ process among staff


Meta has reduced its target for hiring engineers in 2022 to around 6,000 to 7,000, down from an initial plan to hire about 10,000, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said.


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