CALIFORNIA (Kashmir English): Facebook owner Meta platforms is preparing for mass layoffs next week whilst pushing ahead with the expedited hiring of machine learning engineers.
The media reports suggest that the company has already told its staffers about the expected company-wide job cuts in internal memos.
According to a post by Meta’s Head of People Janelle Gale, the notices will go out to employees losing their jobs starting at 5am local time Monday. These notices are likely to be served in several countries including the US.
However, local regulations have exempted employees in countries like France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands from the cuts.
Those in more than a dozen other countries across Africa, Europe and Asia will receive the termination letters between February 11 and February 18, according to the company officials. The company, however, has declined to comment on the posts.
Meta confirmed in January this year that it was planning to trim about 5% of its “lowest performers” and backfill at least some of the positions.
Friday’s Gale post referred to the cuts as “performance terminations”.
In a separate memo posted on Friday, VP of Engineering for Monetization Peng Fan asked staffers to assist with an expedited hiring process for machine learning engineers and other “business critical” engineering roles. Fan further said that the process would take place between February 11 and March 13.
“Thank you for your continued support in helping us achieve our accelerated hiring goals, and better align with our company’s priorities for 2025.”
Meta platforms had 74,067 full-time employees as of December 2024. As of December 2023, more than 262,000 employees at tech companies globally were laid off throughout the year across more than one thousand companies.
Meta revenue
In 2020, Meta’s reported revenue was around 86 billion U.S. dollars and a net income of 29.15 billion US dollars. It is also the most popular social network globally, with 2.7 billion monthly active users as of December 2020.
