According to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the company is experiencing “one of the worst downturns it has seen in recent history.” In a leaked internal memo, Zuckerberg shared with employees that Meta has slashed its target number for new engineers hires this year by about 30 percent. The company originally intended to hire around 10,000 new engineers this year, but that number has now been revised lower to anywhere between 6,000 and 7,000.
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Zuckerberg also mentioned that Meta is raising expectations on current employees and giving them more aggressive goals so that they can decide on their own if the company isn’t for them. “Self-selection is OK with me,” he said.
In a memo to employees, chief product officer Chris Cox stressed that Meta “is in serious times here and the headwinds are fierce.”
“I have to underscore that we are in serious times here and the headwinds are fierce. 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,” Cox said.
Reels is a major focus for the company for the rest of the year, trying to monetise is as quickly as possible. Time spent on Reels has more than doubled around the world since last year, the memo reads, with 80 percent of that growth coming from Facebook. Cox called Reels, its short-form video format created as an answer to TikTok, a “bright point” for the company in the first half of 2022. Meta plans to continue improving the experience, including making changes to the home screen on Instagram and Facebook to incorporate the videos more natively.
