Facebook-owner Meta Platforms has cut plans for hiring engineers by at least 30 percent this year to around 6,000-7,000, down from an initial plan to hire about 10,000 new engineers, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees during an internal Q&A on Thursday.
In addition to reducing hiring, the technology company was leaving certain positions unfilled in response to attrition and turning up the heat on performance management to weed out staffers unable to meet more aggressive business goals, Reuters news report said.
The social media and technology company is expecting tough business conditions in the second half of the year, as it copes with macroeconomic pressures and data privacy hits to its ads business, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters.
The US-based digital company must prioritize more ruthlessly and operate leaner, meaner, better executing teams, Meta Chief Product Officer Chris Cox wrote in the memo, which appeared on the company’s internal discussion forum Workplace before the Q&A.
The world’s biggest social media company lost about half its market value this year, after Meta reported that daily active users on its Facebook app had experienced a quarterly decline for the first time.
Chris Cox said Meta would need to increase fivefold the number of graphic processing units (GPUs) in its data centers by the end of the year to support the discovery push, which requires extra computing power for artificial intelligence to surface popular posts from across Facebook and Instagram in users’ feeds.
Interest in Meta’s TikTok-style short video product Reels was growing quickly, said Chris Cox, with users doubling the amount of time they were spending on Reels year over year, both in the United States and globally.
Some 80 percent of the growth since March came from Facebook, he added.
Chris Cox said Meta saw possibilities for revenue growth in business messaging and in-app shopping tools, the latter of which, he added, could mitigate signal loss created by Apple-led privacy changes.
Chris Cox said the company’s hardware division was focused on launching its mixed-reality headset, code-named Cambria, in the second half of the year.
