Wall Street Journal: The Masses could be out in the Metaverse in the Term of the Jobs Cuts and Apple’s Privacy Change
The job cuts are expected to impact thousands of workers and could begin as early as this week, the Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter. Meta has a headcount of more than 87,000, according to a September SEC filing.
In a conference call in October to discuss third quarter earnings, the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that he expects the group to end in about the same size or smaller as it is today.
The possible cuts come as tightened advertiser budgets and Apple’s iOS privacy changes have weighed on Meta’s core business. The company last month posted its second quarterly revenue decline and reported that its profit was cut in half from the prior year. Billions are mostly to blame for the drop in profitability. A future version of the internet, also known as the metaverse, will most likely remain years away.
Meta had a market cap of more than $1 trillion last year but is now valued at around $250 billion. The stock in Meta opened more than 5% higher on Monday after reports of the job cuts.
How the Big Tech Inclusive Cuts Made Tech Workers Easier: How Walls are Getting Their Jobs, And How Silicon Startups Are Finding Theirs
Last week, the tech industry was shook by the announcement that half of Musk’s workforce would be laid off. And the troubled platform isn’t the only well-known company downsizing. This week brought cuts at Salesforce and Meta, which eliminated 11,000 jobs, or 13 percent of its workforce. Around 3,000 workers have been cut from the payrolls of the companies since last month.
Last week, payment processing firm Stripe said it would be cutting over half of its staff. Amazon announced that it was implementing a pause on corporate hiring.
The cuts were made on Friday under Musk’s ownership. The cuts impacted its ethical AI, marketing and communication, search and public policy team, among other departments.
In the days since, however, Twitter
(TWTR) has reportedly asked dozens of laid off employees to return, according to Bloomberg.
According to the website Layoffs.fyi, more than 118,000 people have lost their jobs in tech this year. At the same time, companies including Amazon and Apple have slowed or frozen their hiring, reducing the number of open roles in Big Tech that can soak up people suddenly out of work. Yet while many individual workers must now find new jobs, the broader outlook for tech workers remains strong. They have responded to recent cuts with support to help laid off workers find new jobs.
Despite their command of the headlines, Big Tech companies are just one niche in the broader tech industry. Many smaller firms and companies in adjacent industries are still hiring tech workers, albeit at slower rates than tech giants recently did, and potentially for lower salaries. Some companies are jumping at the chance to recruit people from smaller companies who used to be recruited from the largest companies.
Julia Pollak, chief economist with ZipRecruiter says, “These workers are at a huge advantage.” “There is still strong demand for tech talent in a wide range of industries, from government to retail to agriculture. Those industries for the past years have been left in the dust.”
The Big Tech forced exodus is also opening new opportunities for startups and investors aiming to create the next big thing. “To everyone affected by the Meta layoffs: Monomi Park is hiring,” Nick Popovich, CEO of an independent gaming studio, tweeted this week. Day One Ventures, a venture capital firm, responded to Big Tech’s cuts by launching an initiative aimed at laid-off workers offering to invest $100,000 in 20 different ideas for new companies. Venture capital companies have $290 billion on hand to invest, according to a new report from PitchBook, and this may be a good sign for new entrepreneurs.