More Metaverse-inspired mayhem for Mark’s once-marvellous Meta

Facebook founder and Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, made the announcement of the further staff cuts in a blog post published on Facebook, in which he emphasised: “This will be tough and there’s no way around that.”

At its peak in earlier 2022, Meta had around 87,000 employees worldwide, with a great many hired post-pandemic as Zuckerberg and his executive team poured money into the Metaverse concept and envisioned that the strong business growth of digital platforms during Covid would continue into the future.

But that has proved not to be the case. Advertising support for the existing platforms has dipped and investors are increasingly concerned that the money being spent on developing the Metaverse concept seems to have become a bottomless pit.

2023 is the Year of Efficiency at Meta

This year has been touted as Meta’s ‘Year of Efficiency’ and Zuckerberg said in his post that a leaner organisation would execute its highest priorities faster.

“People will be more productive, and their work will be more fun and fulfilling. We will become an even greater magnet for the most talented people. That’s why, in our Year of Efficiency, we are focused on cancelling projects that are duplicative or lower priority and making every organisation as lean as possible,” he stated.

It seems there will also be a greater focus on getting the company’s engineers into the office rather having them work remotely, as has been the case.

“Engineers earlier in their career perform better on average when they work in-person with teammates at least three days a week. I encourage all of you to find more opportunities to work with your colleagues in person,” Zuckerberg said.

The latest round of layoffs is scheduled to begin in April and will be in addition to around 100,000 staff redundancies this year at other digital tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Twitter.

When Meta made its first round of dismissals in November 2022, media reports claimed one disgruntled employee had said “the Metaverse will be our slow death” and “Mark Zuckerberg will single-handedly kill a company with the Metaverse”.