The parent company of Facebook and WhatsApp , Meta , has decided to reduce the number of hiring by 30% by 2022.
Meta has made a decision that goes hand in hand with other technology companies that have backtracked on their hiring plans . The Facebook parent company has internally announced a cut in plans for hiring engineers by 30% during 2022, as a preventive measure against a possible economic recession.
The CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg , responded with this measure to a series of questions made by the company’s employees in a weekly session. According to Reuters , Zuckerberg mentions that “if he had to bet, he’d say this could be one of the worst recessions we’ve seen in recent memory.”
As part of its plans, Meta had a projection of hiring 10 thousand new engineers for this year, as part of the implementation of the future metaverse. However, Zuckerberg mentions that this figure was reduced to 6,000 or 7,000.
more stringent targets
In addition to this reduction in employee intake, Zuckerberg noted that some positions are being left “vacant”, which is causing a “temperature rise” in performance management. According to the CEO of Meta, this will serve to eliminate employees who cannot meet more ambitious goals.
“Part of my hope in raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, almost like turning up the heat a little bit, is that I feel like it will help some of you decide if this place isn’t for you, and that I’m okay with natural selection. ”, he said.
Meta seeks traction to compete in the midst of the crisis
Currently, technology companies have been maneuvering to reduce operating costs to face an economic crisis in the United States, which will impact net profits at the end of fiscal year 2022. However, Meta has other challenges.
To begin with, the decision to reduce costs focuses on slowing ad sales, and looking for efficient measures to maintain user growth. In the latter case, the latent threat is the presence of TikTok and its rapid way of hooking new audiences.
The director of products at Meta, Chris Cox, has made it clear in an internal memo that there is a shortage of graphics cards in data centers. In the internal document, he noted that they need to quintuple the number of graphics processing units to push the computational power so that recommendation AI can operate at an efficient rate on Facebook and Instagram.