The purge begins in Meta: the company urges bosses to report employees for poor performance

Meta is somewhat upset by the bad economic situation that the West is going through, and it is not for less: everything is going to waste precisely when they have decided to embark on the most ambitious, risky and expensive project in the company’s history, the construction of the metaverse. For this reason, last week Zuckerberg announced that he was going to moderate the accelerated pace of hiring that he intended to carry out to develop the aforementioned digital universe, and also said, with euphemisms, that the company was preparing to face layoffs.

Persecution. Meta’s CEO then pointed out that his workers would have to prepare from now on to meet more demanding objectives, and that those who could not achieve those goals “probably should not be here.” The reality, on the other hand, is harsher, since the company has given very specific instructions to its middle managers: they must identify the employees with lower performance and report them to their superiors in order to force them to leave the company, according to an internal statement to which the Wall Street Journal has had access.

The order, however, is not final. Once the underperforming worker has been identified, the boss should send him to the Employee Relations team so that these professionals can assess the situation and try to resolve what is causing him not to perform as the company demands. If this group decides that the person cannot “get on track”, they will decree that he has to leave Meta.

Dragged into the wave of layoffs. For the time being, Meta had withstood the blow that is shaking technology companies without dealing with layoffs, but this measure makes it clear that Zuckerberg’s people are going to join other companies such as Netflix, Twitter or Paypal. Although they will do it in a very particular way: pointing out employees for poor performance instead of admitting that the world economic situation is overcoming them and that the mistakes they have made in recent years, from those that appear in the Facebook Files to the reckless bet on the metaverse, has left them no choice but to address this measure.

The bet comes out regular. When Zuckerberg presented his metaverse project, he showed inordinate optimism. It announced a profound reconversion of its business model, multimillion-dollar investments in R&D and thousands of contracts, with a disbursement in a single project that far exceeded what other technology companies dedicate to the development of new devices, applications and tools, as we already explained in Xataka.

The optimism was short-lived, as the economic results of the last six months have derailed Meta’s ambitious plans and have forced them to set much more realistic goals. During the last quarter of 2021, the old Facebook saw its profits reduced by 8%, nothing too serious considering the significant investment in the metaverse if it were not for the fact that from January to March 2022 its profits fell by 21%. In addition, the company’s internal forecasts predict that profits will continue to sink during 2022.

Not just the metaverse. But this drop in profits is not only related to the huge investment in the metaverse. Zuckerberg decided to jump headlong into this project, which is a money-burning machine, at a time when its flagship, Facebook, is in decline, the conglomerate’s reputation is on the rocks as a result of the Facebook Files leaks. and the Apple privacy changes they are greatly hurting your ad business.

A series of setbacks to which the war in Ukraine has been added, which has caused a global economic crisis and which, among other things, has caused the digital advertising market, Meta’s main source of income at the moment, to suffered a strong setback.

The metaverse is reeling. This brake on hiring, if prolonged for a long time, could endanger Zuckerberg’s megaproject. Because the development of the metaverse is a race against time for several reasons that requires a lot of manpower: on the one hand, Meta cannot afford to lose between 3,000 and 10,000 million per quarter indefinitely in its development with no sign of income, and on the other, because Rivals are going to tighten and the company’s big bet to make its investment profitable is to get there first and market multiple aspects of this digital universe.