WorldForum App
Administrator
It's indeed a hard time for everyone, as Facebook set to lay off more workers to reduce the workload in their upcoming org updates timelines. Mark Zuckerberg had just made the announcement. See the Quotes read below
Mark Wrote
I just shared this update on our Year of Efficiency with Meta employees...
First Meta is building the future of human connection, and today I want to share some updates on our Year of Efficiency that will help us do that. The goals of this work are as follows:
(1) To make us a better technology company and
(2) To improve our financial performance in a difficult time and environment so we can execute our long-term vision.
While our efficiency work has several parallel workstreams to improve organizational efficiency, dramatically increase developer productivity and tooling, optimize distributed work, garbage collect unnecessary processes, and more.
I've tried to be open about all the work that's underway, and while I know many of you are energized by this, I also recognize that the idea of upcoming org changes creates uncertainty and stress. I hope to make these org changes as soon as possible in the year so we can get past this period of uncertainty and focus on the critical work ahead.
Here's the timeline you should expect:
Over the next couple of months, org leaders will announce restructuring plans focused on flattening our orgs, canceling lower priority projects, and reducing our hiring rates.With less hiring, I’ve made the difficult decision to further reduce the size of our recruiting team. We will let recruiting team members know tomorrow whether they're impacted. 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.
Overall, we expect to reduce our team size by around 10,000 people and close around 5,000 additional open roles that we haven't yet hired. This will be tough and there's no way around that. It will mean saying goodbye to talented and passionate colleagues who have been part of our success all this while.
They've dedicated themselves to our mission and I'm personally grateful for all their efforts. We will continue to support people in the same ways we have before and treat everyone with the gratitude they deserve.
After restructuring and layoff, some workers we plan to lift hiring and transfer freezes in each group. Other relevant efficiency timelines include targeting this summer to complete our analysis from our hybrid work year of learning so we can further refine our distributed work model.
We also aim to have a steady stream of developer productivity enhancements and process improvements throughout the year.
As I've talked about efficiency this year, I've said that part of our work will involve removing jobs -- and that will be in service of both building a leaner, more technical company and improving our business performance to enable our long-term vision.
I understand that this update may still feel surprising, so I'd like to lay out some broader context on our vision, our culture, and our operating philosophy.
Building A Better Technology Company
Every day Meta builds new ways for people to feel closer. This is a fundamental human need that may be more important in today's complex world than ever.One day we hope to enable every person to feel as strong a sense of connection as you feel when you're physical with someone you love. We do leading work across a wide range of advanced technologies and then distill that into inspiring products that improve people's lives.
We do this with AI to help you creatively express yourself and discover new content, with the metaverse to deliver a real sense of presence, with new media formats to create richer experiences, with encryption to let you communicate privately in more and more ways, and with business tools to help reach customers, create opportunity and grow the economy.
Simply put: if you want to invent the future or apply the best ideas to reach people at the greatest scale, then Meta is the best place to do that. With that in mind, here are some of the cultural principles that are guiding our efficiency work towards making Meta an even stronger technology company:
Flatter is faster
It's well-understood that every layer of a hierarchy adds latency and risk aversion in information flow and decision-making. Every manager typically reviews work and polishes off some rough edges before sending it further up the chain.In our Year of Efficiency, we will make our organization flatter by removing multiple layers of management. As part of this, we will ask many managers to become individual contributors.
We'll also have individual contributors report at almost every level -- not just the bottom -- so information flow between people doing the work and management will be faster. Of course, there are tradeoffs.
We still believe managing each person is very important, so in general, we don't want managers to have more than 10 direct reports. Today many of our managers have only a few direct reports.
That made sense to optimize for ramping up new managers and maintaining buffer capacity when we were growing our organization faster, but now that we don't expect to grow headcount as quickly, it makes more sense to fully utilize each manager's capacity and defragment layers as much as possible.
Leaner is better
Since we reduced our workforce last year, one surprising result is that many things have gone faster. In retrospect, I underestimated the indirect costs of lower-priority projects.It's tempting to think that a project is net positive as long as it generates more value than its direct costs. But that project needs a leader, so maybe we take someone great from another team or maybe we take a great engineer and put them into a management role, which both diffuses talent and creates more management layers.
That project team needs space, and maybe it tips its overall product group into splitting across multiple floors or multiple time zones, which now makes communication harder for everyone.
That project team needs laptops and HR benefits and may want to recruit more engineers, so that leads us to hire even more IT, HR, and recruiting people, and now those orgs grow and become less efficient and responsive to higher priority teams as well.
Maybe the project has overlap with work on another team or maybe it built a bespoke technical system when it should have used the general infrastructure we'd already built, so now it will take leadership focus to deduplicate that effort. Indirect costs compound and it's easy to underestimate them.
A leaner org will 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 canceling projects that are duplicative or lower priority and making every organization as lean as possible. Please continue reading on the next thread below