Background

Meta is one of the largest software corporations in the world today. Meta had been hiring engineers of different skill sets over the last few years. However, due to the weak economic scenario currently and an upcoming recession fear, there is a steep decline in the number of new recruitment in Meta. Meta is also retracing its steps on various internship offers that it has shared with the candidates. The offers by Meta were considered some of the most coveted by the aspirants in the technology industry. However, the financial troubles at Meta have forced them to put a freeze on the ongoing hiring strategy. It is one of the latest signs that Meta's cost-cutting and budget saving strategies will continue for some more time. The stock price of Meta has declined severely in recent years due to a lack of good news. There is literally to cheer for Meta in Wall Street. The interns said they learned via an email from Meta that their offers are being frozen. The layoffs at Meta are part of an ongoing initiative where Meta is trying to optimize its workforce. As the CEO at Meta has highlighted, that there are people in the organization who should not be there. Managers across all the teams in Meta have been requested to find out the lowest performing individuals. Once these individuals are identified they're taken off the team and given a grace period during which they work with the recruiters to find other projects in the company. Subscribe below to get access to the Meta interview questions.

Read more: What is working at Meta like? »

Meta Interns Hiring Freeze

The interns who had received offers from Meta have also received the job cuts around the globe. Many of the Meta interns and who were planning to join the London office had accepted their Meta offers several months before. These interns had even turned down offers from other reputed organizations because they were planning to join Meta. However, with Meta senior management's recent decisions, these interns have now been left hanging. These interns are now complaining that their future is now uncertain because Meta has taken this decision of hiring freeze and laid them off. Interns who have been laid off from Meta are now desperately searching other job offers. They're saying that life is often not fair and unexpected things can happen and many of them have already started to accept their fate. Meta accepted that the interns are an important part in shaping their future. The Meta senior management also highlighted that this was a difficult decision, and it was made as a last resort because Meta is currently in deep trouble. Meta had been focusing on optimizing its hiring strategies and revising their targets to retain employees for only the highest priority tasks. Only those projects that are aligned with Meta's long term goal and vision are being considered right now.

Meta Interns Layoffs

All investments and hiring is being currently done based on the long term priority and vision. The Meta senior management also highlighted that they had hoped the economy would be in much better shape by now, but due to the ongoing economic volatility and uncertainty they are being forced to plan conservatively over the next few years. There is one more term that is being used, known as 'quiet layoff'. The quiet layoff process in Meta is related to putting thousands of employees on different performance improvement plans. This is seen as a precursor to being laid off from Meta. Employees will have to work hard once they're put in these performance improvement plans and acquire necessary skills that is relevant to the company. However, there is no guarantee that once these trainings are completed the employees will be given their job back in the organization. Meta had unveiled one of its new offices in London, and there were several interns who were planning to join this new office over the next year. The internship programs at Meta offices around the world is now in deep uncertainty as Meta is very strict on its hiring currently. Intern candidates who are awaiting to join Meta for their internship program will now have to wait and see what further updates are being announced for them. Subscribe to this site and keep following to get the latest updates on the different Meta hiring and internship news.

Meta Financial Trouble

Meta has also highlighted that the company will be a lot smaller by the next few years. The budget cuts will be implemented across all the divisions and departments in the organization. This is due to the effect of the current economy that has directly affected Meta. Meta has also been affected by the privacy changes that has been introduced by Apple in its iPhones. Meta is now no longer able to collect data from its users like before. Hence, advertisers are seeing fewer clicks on their ads on Facebook, because users are not seeing relevant ads to them. That personalization feature is now working pretty poorly in Meta. Due to a prediction of slower growth in the coming years, the share price of Meta is falling constantly. Meta is heavily focusing on its Metaverse project which is going to be the future of social media as Meta senior leadership team put it. Virtual reality and augmented reality will be heavily used in the Metaverse projects. However, the Metaverse project will take several years before it becomes profitable. Until the Metaverse project becomes profitable, it will only see investment and not enough profits.

Meta Facing Competition

Meta is also seeing a lot of the younger audience moving on to other platforms like TikTok and Snapchat. The algorithms that have been created by the other apps are often focused on providing fresher content with their discovery algorithms. Many Meta users are now saying they're bored with the user tracking and Facebook's like-based algorithms This is also going to be one of the major reasons of worry about Meta. With the younger audiences going out to other apps, it can only mean that the future active user base of Meta is declining. Other companies like Amazon and Google have also started their own hiring freeze. Thus, all the technology workers in these organizations are tensed and constantly monitoring their job security. One of the aspects that Meta is focusing on in saving their finances is relying on remote work. Remote work is saving the costs of renting an office space. By providing quality remote work software and hardware, Meta is planning to optimize its finances over the next few years. Meta had initially planned to hire a specific number of engineers in the current year. However, there has been a high percentage reduction in the hiring target due to the global economic situation.

Meta Building Metaverse

Meta has also increased its funds dedicated for the research and development of its hardware division in Metaverse. The hardware division of Metaverse is in charge of creating immersive hardware for a virtual reality experience. The Meta senior management has highlighted that Metaverse is going to be the place where all the users of social media will interact in the future. Hence, there is a high demand for skilled artificial intelligence engineers in these projects. The number of vacancies is small. However, Meta is constantly hiring for positions as soon as they open in these projects. The Meta CEO also believes that Metaverse will be able to attract billions of people and huge investments into Meta in the future. The monetization services will be severely scaled up at that time. New monetization model of Metaverse is currently in progress and is being planned to grow even more in the future. Meta has also launched digital clothing boutique for its social media avatars, where it will be monetizing the digital goods. The senior management at Meta mentioned that it is facing one of the worst economic downturns in the history of Meta.

Meta New Performance Review Model

Meta also highlighted that they were leaving many positions vacant and unfilled in response to attrition. In parallel, they are working on turning up the heat with an aggressive performance management model to find out staffers who are unable to meet the new aggressive goals. The management at Meta is hoping that by raising the expectations and having more aggressive performance goals, they will get more work done with lesser employees. And if any employee feels during this process that they are being stressed out, or that Meta is not a suitable place with such kind of workload, then they can move out to other opportunities. This has been explicitly mentioned by the Meta senior management. Meta is working on prioritizing their projects more ruthlessly and want to operate with leaner teams with better execution and productivity. The headwinds have been termed as pretty fierce in the current environment where growth is very slow. Meta has highlighted it implies that they should not expect any influx of new engineers or budgets in the near future.

Meta Future Roadmap

Over the last several years, the number of users who were actively using Meta products has been steadily increasing. However, Meta experienced a decline in its active users for the first time in various segments of its social media ecosystem. This comes at a tricky time, where competition is fierce from other products and vendors with apps like TikTok and Snapchat. The discovery algorithm of TikTok has proven to be a huge success with younger audience. Meta is now trying to catch up with the updates to its algorithm for contents which it has missed in the competition to TikTok. Getting the younger audience back to Meta is a challenge that Meta needs to address to see a more profitable future. One of the major investments that Meta needs to make to compete with TikTok is to increase its graphic processing units by nearly five times in its data centers. This would put it in a level playing field with TikTok and other competing apps and products in the market. This extra computing power will make Meta ready for the competition that it is facing from other vendors and products. It will be interesting to see how Meta fares in this competitive market and stabilizes its future.