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| Freeze Meta Assignment to Marketing Teams and Other Products |
Meta has stopped investing in several products, including the team it built at the start of the pandemic to compete with Zoom and develop shopping capabilities.
The company has not only stopped hiring some technical jobs but has also stopped hiring low-level data scientists.
While the hiring freeze has employees fear imminent layoffs, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at an internal meeting that layoffs are not expected.
"I can't commit forever, we don't have to reconsider that as things change," Zuckerberg said. But what I can say is that we don't expect to do that. Instead, we basically have this growth to a level that we think can be controlled over time.
In the past few days, company leaders have begun telling some teams that they cannot hire new engineers or accept internal transfers.
It's a sign that these particular products aren't profitable or strategic enough to keep investing, and Meta stock is down 43% this year.
Product teams affected by the engineering pause include dating, gaming, Messenger Kids, and group marketing. Telepresence teams, formed during the pandemic to create voice and video calling capabilities to better compete with Zoom, have also been affected.
Meta spokesman Joe Osborne confirmed that technical appointments for some teams have been suspended. However, the company continues to employ machine learning and artificial intelligence functions.
"We assess and support key business priorities, particularly those related to our core business and reality labs," he said in a statement.
Mark Zuckerberg reduces the likelihood of employees being fired
Inside Reality Labs, which provides software and hardware for Zuckerberg's bet on the company's future virtual world, chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth recently told employees that the company is freezing some projects in favor of others.
Employees of a department that employs more than 17,000 people will not be retained. No specific changes within the team were reported internally.
Zuckerberg told employees last week that TikTok's meteoric rise hurt Meta. Apple's tech and ad tracking stock sale wiped out billions of dollars in advertising revenue.
At the same time, Zuckerberg tried to reassure them that the company, with its multibillion-dollar balance sheet and quarterly earnings, was in good shape. Many on Wall Street think it could be a prolonged slump in the stock markets.
"If we lower our growth target, you will hear a lot of speculation about what the problem is," he said at a composite internal meeting. But I would say we are in a very strong position, our business is doing very well and we continue to grow rapidly.