USA-Meta: 30% fewer engineers will be hired this year

Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc has cut its plans to hire engineers this year by at least 30%, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees yesterday as he warned them to prepare for a deep decline in the economy.

Meta has cut its 2022 engineer hiring goal by about 6,000-7,000 below its original plan to hire about 10,000 new engineers, Zuckerberg said.

The company confirmed the suspension of hiring at a wider level last month, without however having previously reported the exact numerical data.

In addition to the hiring cuts, Zuckerberg said, Meta will leave specific executive positions vacant in response to attrition and “keeping a low profile” on management’s decisions to remove executives who couldn’t meet aggressive goals. from the company.

Meta will “need to more aggressively evaluate its priorities” and operate with “smaller, more efficient and less demanding executive teams,” product and services development chief Chris Cox wrote in the same internal memo, which appeared at the gathering staff to exchange questions and answers.

“I want to point out that we are going through difficult times here and the headwinds are strong. It is necessary to operate seamlessly in an environment of lower economic growth, where teams should not expect large inflows of new engineers, but of budgets,” Cox wrote.

This internal memo “was intended to create an environment regarding what the company has publicly announced about its earnings, regarding the challenges it faces, but also the opportunities we have, regarding the larger fields of action to address the situation ,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement.

SOURCE: APE-ME