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"We are not laying off staff, we are just cutting costs on a large scale."

When it comes to layoffs, we often see the art of language in some technology companies. For example, the layoff letter is turned into a "graduation notice", the business shutdown is described as "structural optimization", and dismissal is described as "sending talents to society".

Recently, under the pressure of economic downturn, large Silicon Valley companies such as Meta, Google, Amazon and so on have not only joined the ranks of "language artists", but also emerged one after another at the practical level: frozen recruitment, business restructuring, internal conversion, performance appraisal, tearing offer …... Although no one talks about layoffs, a series of operations actually point to downsizing.

A massive layoff involving tens of thousands of people has begun. The big factories seem to be calm, but in fact they are already undercurrent.

| Meta opens the "30-day list", which could affect 12000 people. in the past few months, Zuckerberg seems to be open about his plan to be tough with employees. First, give employees a "vaccination" at the company's internal meeting, saying bluntly that not all Meta employees meet the company's standards, requiring everyone to work harder, put pressure on themselves, and leave at any time if they don't want to do it.

At a weekly employee question-and-answer session at the end of last month, Zuckerberg made it clear that Meta would restructure its team and lay off staff to cut spending and priorities, the first major budget cut since Facebook was founded in 2004. In addition, Zuckerberg also said bluntly that "Meta will steadily reduce the growth of employees, and the size of Meta in 2023 will be smaller than this year."

The picture is taken from Bloomberg, but Meta does not cut people on a large scale at once like Snap, but uses a "blunt knife to cut meat" and an enhanced version of the performance change to let employees leave. Before the meeting, Meta executives had proposed to the board to select at least 15 per cent of people in the internal review process marked as "Need Support", according to anonymous sources from Meta employees on Blind.

In the Meta employee evaluation process, the person marked as NS means that he or she has failed to meet his performance goals, while recently, once an employee is listed in NS, it is likely to mean that he or she is in a crisis of unemployment. Since July this year, Meta executives have issued NS targets to various teams, forcing each department to select a certain proportion of people to be included in the list.

After being listed in NS, employees who join PIP will have 30 days to seek a transfer internally, and if they can't find a job in another department after 30 days, they will be fired. Many employees say that Meta's plan is ostensibly to promote employee progress, but the reality is that many people are being forced to leave.

According to Meta's second-quarter results, it has 83533 employees worldwide. If the performance improvement is carried out at 15%, more than 12000 employees will be affected, and many employees will start doing exercises to find a next job. Judging from the constantly updated news, this Meta deals with not only junior employees, but also many team managers.

The picture shows that the current situation of BlindMeta is not very optimistic, its market capitalization has fallen from more than $1 trillion in September 2021 to less than $400 billion today, social family user and revenue growth is significantly sluggish, and Metasverse is still burning money crazily. Cost-cutting seems inevitable for Meta, and the most immediate "cost reduction" undoubtedly comes from staff cuts.

| Google also wants to bid farewell to the "old-age" era and start layoffs from internal integration. Although the recent discussion on Meta is the hottest, layoffs and cost-cutting plans by other big Silicon Valley companies are actually under way, and they are not small.

Among them, Google, which used to be regarded as an iconic pension company, has obviously revealed the breath of wolf nature recently.

At Google's Code Conference conference in the middle of last month, Google CEO Pichai publicly said he wanted to increase the company's efficiency by 20 per cent in the face of increased economic uncertainty and a slowdown in advertising revenue. In his speech, he mentioned two key issues: that the company has become "slower" after the surge in the number of employees; and that Google is taking steps to improve efficiency, citing past examples of integrating YouTube Music and Google Play Music into one product, hinting at departmental integration.

The picture was taken from the analysis of CNBC at that time, and the 20% figure mentioned by Pichai was not a casual statement. This expression in public means that Google has conducted a lot of internal investigations and arguments, and finally determined the proportion layer by layer.

Immediately after that, Google fired its first shot at layoffs. In mid-September, Area 120, Google's internal R & D and innovation incubator, announced downsizing, and seven of its 14 ongoing R & D projects were cut. Area 120 is an entrepreneurial project launched by Google in 2016 to provide a platform for employees to test new ideas and incubate new projects.

Area 120 has hatched a lot of products, such as HTML5 game platform GameSnacks, video platforms Tangi and Shoploop, Internet travel App Touring Bird and so on, many of which have been later integrated into Google's main product system. In addition to Qaya, an online storefront service launched at the end of last year, the cut also includes financial and accounting projects on Google forms, shopping-related products, AR / VR climate analysis and other related projects that are just beginning to move forward.

This time, about half of Area 120 employees have been affected, and Google has given them 90 days to switch internally, and if they can't find a job, they will be fired in January.

From the cut of Area 120, it seems that Google's departmental integration has begun to start with low-yield departments, and many people speculate that the departments in Google The other bets will later become the focus of integration.

In addition to implementing internal project integration, Google is also implementing stricter performance management at a broader employee level. Google has launched an internal program called Simplicity Sprint since July, which aims to solicit ideas and suggestions from all employees on how to "get better results faster" and "eliminate waste" to further help the company cut costs.

Taken from Blind in recent months, Google has stepped up pressure from management to execution, telling employees that they need to work hard to meet expectations or be prepared to be laid off. Since the beginning of this year, Google has missed revenue expectations for two consecutive quarters, and its second-quarter net profit fell 14% from a year earlier, the slowest growth rate in nearly two years.

According to CNBC, Google executives have recently been vaccinating employees, and if the company's upcoming third-quarter results don't meet expectations, the company will officially start laying off staff.

| Amazon, the "recruitment madman", is slowing down, freezing recruitment and shutting down projects are coming one after another, and the pressure is increasing, and Amazon, which used to be the most active, diligent and versatile in recruiting, has obviously calmed down.

Although Amazon has not stopped hiring on a company-wide basis (AWS continues to hire), the popularity has plummeted. A Silicon Valley engineer told Silicon people that at the beginning of this year, they were bombarded with several, peak or even a dozen emails a day from Amazon headhunters, but recently they have received only one or two emails a week.

According to Amazon's second-quarter results, Amazon cut nearly 100000 jobs in the second quarter of this year, the biggest quarterly decline in the company's history, but it mainly involved warehouse workers at the time, and the situation was not so grim. But last week, Amazon announced that it would suspend hiring in its retail business and said it would continue until the end of the year.

The growth of e-commerce retail, Amazon's core business, is slowing significantly. So far this year, Amazon's retail revenue has grown 7 per cent year-on-year for two consecutive quarters and remains in single digits, well below the 20 per cent growth of 40 per cent last year and the year before last. While revenue is falling, costs are still rising sharply, and Amazon's profit is largely supported by the cloud business throughout 2022.

Photo taken from Blind in addition to the slowdown in hiring, some of Amazon's experimental projects have recently been shut down one after another. On October 7th Amazon announced that it would shut down its home delivery robot business. Amazon launched the automated robot Scout three years ago to automatically deliver goods, and just four months ago, Amazon held a special product promotion meeting for Scout. But now that the project has stopped development, 400 team members will be disbanded on the spot after the business is cut off, and some of these employees will be transferred to other internal departments, while others plan to leave Amazon.

In addition, some projects that Amazon has been exploring for years, including unmanned stores and delivery drone services, as well as Amazon Glow, a children's video call device, and Amazon Care, a telemedicine service, which have just been released in the last two years, have also been reported to be suspended or being gradually shut down.

Overall, Amazon is focusing on ensuring the operation of AWS, the biggest source of profit, while other departments are exercising stricter cost controls.

Amazon automatic delivery robot Scout, pictures from several Amazon Silicon Valley companies, Microsoft and Apple's performance is relatively stable. Microsoft announced in early July that it would cut 1% of its workforce worldwide, involving about 1800 people in its consulting, customer and partner solutions departments, but Microsoft later stated that the layoff was a normal business adjustment for the company and was not affected by the deteriorating economic or financial situation. It said it would continue to expand its workforce in 2022. Apart from laying off about 100 contract workers in August, Apple has not seen any signs of layoffs.

Although there is no formal large-scale layoffs, but at present, almost all the big companies have slowed the pace of recruitment, and many departments have entered a state of frozen recruitment.

The third-quarter results of major companies will be announced later this month. If the tech giants do not perform well, there may be a bigger storm ahead.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: Silicon Man (ID:guixingren123), Wen | Juny Editor | VickyXiao

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