In a weekly Q&A, Mark Zuckerberg told Facebook employees the company is, in his opinion, heading into, “one of the worst downturns that we’ve seen in recent history,” and that they will be scaling back hiring and looking to “turn up the heat” on employees to drive away some of the poorer performers.
On Thursday, during the CEO’s weekly Q&A with his employees, he told them they are scaling back hiring of engineers, from the previous expectation of more than 10,000, to only 6,000 to 7,000 in 2022. He cited strong economic headwinds the company was sailing into. and the present market downturn. as the reasons for streamlining.
In addition, he noted some positions at the company are going to be left vacant, and they would be “turning up the heat” on employees, hoping to drive away underperforming workers.
Zuckerberg said, “Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here. 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.”
The announcement caps off a staff expansion the company just completed. By the end of Q1 2022, the company had 28% more employees than it had the same time the previous year. By May, Facebook had imposed a hiring freeze across several sectors of the company however, due to poorer earnings.
The hiring slowdown was confirmed in an internal memo placed on the company’s internal discussion forum Workplace, which was obtained by Reuters. Written by chief product officer Chris Cox, it cited macroeconomic pressures and Apple’s new privacy initiative for the iPhone as hurting the company’s advertising business, and outlined ways the company would try to minimize the losses. Meta had already been encountering headwinds, seeing diminishing active daily users for the first time on Facebook, in the last quarter of 2021.
Cox wrote, “We need to execute flawlessly in an environment of slower growth, where teams should not expect vast influxes of new engineers and budgets. We must prioritize more ruthlessly, be thoughtful about measuring and understanding what drives impact, invest in developer efficiency and velocity inside the company, and operate leaner, meaner, better exciting teams.”
One option Facebook will pursue to try and ameliorate its losses is monetizing Instagram Reels, its challenge to TicTok. It will attempt to mimic TicTok’s use of AI to lure in viewers and present them content based on preferences to keep them hooked.
Cox had pointed out in his memo that user time spent on Reels had doubled year over year. Cox noted that Facebook needed to put ads on Reels, “as quickly as possible.”
However video service is expensive, and Cox noted that Meta will need to increase GPU numbers in its data centers by 500%, by the end of Q4, in order to power all of the videos it will be serving.
