Comment on this story
comment
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended his leadership of the social media giant during a staff meeting Thursday morning, two days after the company announced the company would cut 10,000 jobs as part of a months-long restructuring and downsizing.
Zuckerberg was asked a question about how employees should trust the company’s leadership after two rounds of layoffs. He said he would expect to be evaluated based on the company’s performance and transparency regarding its mission, but that executives should be allowed to change their minds, according to a live audio stream from City Hall that the Washington mail was provided.
The time of the moonshot in Silicon Valley is over
“I would guess that the way people would judge whether you would trust me and want to work at this company is whether we are managing to make progress toward the overall stated goals,” Zuckerberg said at City Hall. “I think it’s mostly about the results that we can deliver.”
Zuckerberg also spoke during the hour-long meeting about why the company announced a company-wide restructuring and layoff plan, four months after the CEO told employees at a company-wide meeting in November that he doesn’t expect to see those kinds of cuts again must make the “foreseeable future”.
The CEO said what ultimately changed is that he thinks the general economic pressures the company is facing will continue for a while and that he sees the cuts in November appeared to make the company more efficient .
“But I think it’s a fair question,” he said.
Meta declined to comment.
Zuckerberg’s comments come two days after he announced the company would lay off more employees and close 5,000 open positions over the next few months as part of a larger effort to cut costs and streamline the company’s hierarchy amid mounting business pressures. The latest layoffs build on November’s job cuts, which saw 11,000 jobs, or about 13 percent of Meta’s workforce, cut in the first large-scale layoffs in the company’s history.
Zuckerberg proclaimed earlier this year that 2023 would be the “Year of Efficiency” after months of declining revenue. The social media giant, which makes its money mostly from digital advertising, is facing increasing competition for ad dollars and users from newer entrants into the social media market like short-form video network TikTok. The company has also acknowledged that it overestimated how much the e-commerce market would grow after pandemic restrictions were lifted.
During Thursday’s town hall, Zuckerberg was also asked about the future prospects of remote work.
The company noted Tuesday that early analysis found that engineers who joined the company as a personal employee and were then transferred to a remote position or remained in the office performed better, on average, than those who left the company join remotely.
Layoffs at tech giants raise concerns about dot-com crash 2.0
Zuckerberg didn’t rule out creating new rules to let people return to the office for a set amount of time, but said it was an “ongoing conversation.”
He added that the company made the decision to suspend most remote hiring for the time being.
Another employee asked how Meta employees could be productive when the threat of layoffs and project cuts loomed over their heads.
Zuckerberg acknowledged that the early announcement of the layoff plans is creating a period of uncertainty, but said that “it’s not like we can just pause work while we figure this out.”
Ultimately, in his opinion, it would be better if the employees were informed about the plans in advance.