Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly announced that he is not in favour of “managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who are doing the work”. According to the weekly newsletter Command Line from The Verge’s Alex Heath, Zuckerberg hinted at more layoffs in middle management during an internal Q&A meeting last week.
As per the report, Zuckerberg thinks that several layers of management are a waste of resources and the managers who build bigger teams should not be rewarded. Earlier in January, the newsletter had reported that Meta’s chief product officer Chris Cox mentioned on the company’s communication platform – Workplace – about the possible “flattening” of the organisational structure. The newsletter suggested that employees should brace for more job cuts in the near future.
Zuckerberg also touched upon the progress of AI tools, similar to ChatGPT, to help engineers with coding, and non-engineers, too, over time.
In November 2022, Meta said that it will let go of 13% of its workforce, or more than 11,000 employees, in one of the biggest tech layoffs of the year and the first in the company’s 18-year history. While Meta announced then that it also plans to extend its hiring freeze through the first quarter, Zuckerberg apologised and took responsibility for these actions.
Tech companies went on an expansion spree during the pandemic boom. But decades-high inflation, rapidly rising interest rates and clear expectations of a recession have made the past few months gloomy for the technology sector.
Several Big Tech firms have carried out massive layoffs, citing ‘macroeconomic situations’ among the reasons for handing over pink slips to their employees. From Google to Spotify, several top firms have been slashing their workforce as part of ‘restructuring’ measures.