Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

On Oct. 5, several employees revealed that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, is quietly cutting jobs by changing its performance expectations, which could affect as many as 15% (or 12000) of the company's employees.

During a weekly question and answer session last week, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta chief executive, made it clear that the company would extend the hiring freeze that has been in place since May. Just before the meeting, executives proposed to the board that they should select at least 15 per cent of people in the internal review process as "in need of support", according to one employee.

This was also discussed by an Meta employee in a post on the anonymous forum Blind last week. "these 15 per cent are likely to be included in the performance improvement plan (PIP) and then fired," he wrote at the time. The post sparked hundreds of comments from other Meta employees, debating how many of them would be fired.

During Meta's employee evaluation process, people who are marked as "in need of support" mean that they fail to meet their performance goals. Employees generally believe that this is a harbinger of unemployment. In July, Maher Saba, Meta's engineering director, told managers that they needed to identify all employees on their team who were in the "need to support" category, but did not specify how much they made up the team.

If 15 per cent of employees are included in the performance improvement plan, it means that about 12000 people at Meta will be affected, some of whom will be given 30 days to find new positions or leave within the company. A spokesman for the company declined to comment. Some employees commented that so many people were considered "underperforming" that Meta was actually "quietly laying off staff".

Another person familiar with the Meta recruitment process says some managers who are implementing performance improvement plans, or who are expected to disband the team, have been told to look elsewhere. "it looks like they are continuing to make progress, but the reality is that they are being forced to leave," the person familiar with the matter said. "

Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, did a similar thing before its recent restructuring. Earlier this summer, managers at the company were urged to include at least 10 per cent of their employees in performance improvement plans, and some told their teams earlier that layoffs were expected. At the end of August, the company laid off about 20% of its full-time staff and even shut down some projects and acquired applications.

Labeling a large number of employees as "underperforming" may be the latest sign that Meta is on the verge of some kind of restructuring or layoffs. It is reported that the company's employees have been preparing for this for several months and the number of Meta employees is expected to decline by 10 per cent by the end of this year. Meta has begun layoffs at its main contractor center in Austin, Texas.

Over the past two years, Meta has expanded so rapidly that it has more than 80,000 employees. But in May, Zuckerberg said that more employees choosing to leave would make Meta a better company. Subsequently, the company announced a hiring freeze.

Since then, Zuckerberg has also said that he will control costs and set new goals for the company's trajectory, that many teams will "downsize" and that he expects the company to "do more with fewer resources". Other executives have also said in internal messages, meetings and memos that the company is pushing for a new task of "increasing intensity", with the ultimate goal of finding people to fire in some way.

Many factors are affecting Meta's digital advertising business, which represents almost all of the company's revenue. David Wehner, Meta's chief financial officer, said revenue growth had slowed when he imposed the hiring freeze in May.

Zuckerberg reportedly said in a conversation with employees last week that he wanted the economy to stabilize significantly now, "but from what we've seen, there doesn't seem to be any sign of improvement, so we want to be a little more conservative."

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