Job cuts in Metaverse – “bunch of people shouldn’t be here”
Alternative reality resort the Metaverse is beginning to look a risky property investment for mobile network operators (MNOS) as its chief proponent Meta Platforms (Meta) has announced plans to pull some of its investments. Meta, the owner of Facebook, is to cut the numbers of engineers it hires this year up to 35%, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees on Thursday. Zuckerberg warned his employees they “might be [in] one of the worst downturns in recent history,” in a recording heard by Reuters.
Hiring
Meta is still hiring engineers, however, but its target for 2022 has been revised from 10,000 to around 6,500 – exact figures are not available. Facebook is also managing decline by not filling vacated positions and it’s allegedly “turning up the heat” on staff with “aggressive goals” to encourage them to leave, which would save on redundancy payments. There is a “bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here,” said the social media CEO.
Privacy
Zuckerberg gave a hint of the culture of the alternative cosmos he intends to command after land-grabbing the Metaverse. “Some of you might decide that this place isn’t for you, and that self-selection is OK with me,” said the Meta supremo. The social media and technology company is bracing for a leaner second half of the year, as it contends with real-world pressures, such as the global economic downturn. The incompatibility of Meta’s advertising business tactics is increasingly at odds with growing demands for data privacy, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters.
Scale back
The company must “prioritize more ruthlessly” and “operate leaner, meaner, better executing teams,” chief product officer Chris Cox wrote in the memo. “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,” Cox wrote. Tech companies across the board have scaled back their ambitions in anticipation of a US recession. However the fall in Meta’s stock, it has lost about half its market value this year, has been more severe than at rivals Apple and Google.
Shock tactics
Two new tactics were mooted by Cox. One involves a re-incarnation of social media products, presenting them as “Discovery” tools, in order to see off competition from TikTok. The second sting would involve luring punters into a world of augmented and virtual reality, but this is “an expensive long-term bet on technology,” said Reuters correspondent Katie Paul. Cox said Meta would need five times more graphic processing units (GPUs) in its data centres 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.
Short Tik-Tok
Interest in Meta’s TikTok-style short video product Reels is growing quickly, said Cox, with users doubling the amount of time they were spending on Reels each year, across the globe. Around 80% of Meta’s growth since March has come from Facebook, so the user engagement with Reels could provide a key route to bolster the bottom line, making it important to boost ads in Reels “as quickly as possible,” said Cox.