An employee of Meta Office in Singapore was struggling to open his laptop after waking up in the morning. Suddenly there was a sound in the inbox. It was 4 o’clock in the morning. The e-mail reads — ‘Your services are no longer required by the company.’
In this way, Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, fired about 8 thousand workers in a flash without any fuss. This number is about 10 percent of the total workforce.
But the perfect and ruthless strategy that Meta has taken behind this retrenchment process has left the corporate world in awe. The day before the layoffs, Metro workers around the world were instructed—’no need to come to the office today, work from home.’ No town hall meetings, no chance to stand in the corridor and share fears with colleagues.
This shock of retrenchment did not come suddenly. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has now declared artificial intelligence (AI) as the company’s number one priority. According to Meta sources, they plan to spend 12,500 to 14,500 million dollars on AI technology this year.
Simply put, meta is now pouring money behind technology instead of people. Mater Chief People Officer Janelle Gale said in an internal letter that in addition to the 8,000 layoffs, about 7,000 employees are being integrated into the new AI-based team. Besides, 6 thousand vacancies have been abolished. The engineering and product teams have suffered the most. “We’re now at the point where it’s possible to work much faster and more efficiently with smaller teams or pods,” Janel said. In other words, Zuckerberg’s army is not willing to spend more on people by keeping a big team.
Last month, the news of these layoffs was leaked. Since then, mental exhaustion and panic among the workers reached extremes. According to sources, fearing to lose their jobs before the official announcement, many workers left the office with free snacks, cold drinks and extra laptop chargers in their pockets.
Meanwhile, a new controversy has further poisoned Meta’s internal environment. Meta has reportedly started using a tracking tool that monitors workers’ mouse movements and keyboard typing movements, with the aim of training AI systems more precisely. The workers of Meta are angry against this. More than 1,000 workers have already signed a petition against this tracking.
A section of the workers complained that in case of retrenchment in the office, the fire of anger or protest would spread, and earlier everyone was retrenched by ‘work from home’.
This mass layoff is the result of a temporary recession? Technology experts don’t think so. Deepal Dutta, CEO of Redocure, a technology consulting company, told the media, ‘The storm that is blowing in the technology sector is not a temporary economic strain. It is a permanent structural change. Generative AI and robotic workflows are now automating tasks such as simple coding, customer service or data management. As a result, the old model of increasing business by increasing the number of people has collapsed.
According to Dipal, it is now difficult to sustain employees who can only write simple code or do rote work. What is needed now are professionals who can manage and architect complex AI systems.
This trend of layoffs in the tech world is not limited to Meta. Cisco Systems laid off 4,000 workers last week. Giants like Microsoft, Amazon, Disney are also laying off workers regularly. Even last April, Oracle laid off 20,000 to 30,000 workers worldwide at dawn e-mail.
