The tech industry’s moment of reckoning: layoffs and hiring freezes

After the company laid off about 4,000 employees in technical roles on Wednesday, employees asked Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg why they should stay at the company in a virtual Q&A on Thursday, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Here’s the full question, and his response:

During the Q&A with employees, Mr. Zuckerberg was asked “You’ve shattered the morale and confidence in leadership of many high performers who work with intensity. Why should we stay at Meta?”

Mr. Zuckerberg told employees he hopes they are at Meta because they believe in the work that the company is doing. 

“There’s no other company in the world that delivers social experiences at the scale that we are and that does so across such a diversity of different products and use cases,” he said. “So if you want to reach people in the billions and have a massive impact, I think this is a great place to be.”

The employees at Meta’s Instagram office in London could either be cut or relocated as part of the company’s latest round of layoffs, according to a report from Bloomberg. That also means Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri is headed back to the US after moving to the UK last year.

The company confirmed the layoffs to CNBC and shared an exec memo about the changes. It’s unclear how many were laid off, but the decision arrives nearly a month after CEO Andy Jassy announced an additional 9,000 job cuts.

Vox reports the company plans to lay off “in the range of” 4,000 people on Wednesday. Seems like this will be part of the 10,000 job cuts Meta announced in March.

If you can’t raise in the US... try, try again?

“We came to San Francisco looking for them in 2017. Now . . . everyone is coming to [us],” said Ibrahim Ajami, head of ventures at Mubadala Capital, part of Mubadala Investment Company, a $284bn Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund. “The tech correction has humbled the industry.”

Some good news to end your week with. In an update to its readers, Digital Photography Review’s general manager Scott Everett confirms the site’s content will remain online after the site shuts down on April 10th.

Glad to see nearly 25 years of work not going to waste, but I’ll still miss checking DPReview scores for all the upcoming cameras.

Around 100 employees in Amazon’s gaming divisions are being laid off as part of the company’s broader cuts, according to a report from Bloomberg. While some of the affected employees work at the company’s game studio in San Diego, work will apparently still continue on an unannounced game.

In an announcement, Indeed CEO Chris Hyams says the jobs listing company is cutting around 2,200 jobs across all departments, marking yet another tech business impacted by the rough economy.

Hyams said he takes “sole accountability” for the move, and states that he’ll be taking a 25 percent cut in base pay:

With future job openings at or below pre-pandemic levels, our organization is simply too big for what lies ahead... We have held out longer than many other companies, but the revenue trends are undeniable. So I have decided to act now.

Sure, Apple didn’t go on the “hiring binges” during the pandemic that some of its rivals did. But it also understands something its rivals don’t: layoffs are a strong signal that the c-suite screwed up.

Twitch CEO Dan Clancy, who just stepped into the role on Thursday, shared the number as part of a new blog post shortly after the announcement of Amazon’s next huge wave of layoffs.

“Like many companies, our business has been impacted by the current macroeconomic environment, and user and revenue growth has not kept pace with our expectations,” according to Clancy. “In order to run our business sustainably, we’ve made the very difficult decision to shrink the size of our workforce.”

You can read more about Amazon’s layoffs in our post from earlier today.

The company is delaying some bonuses and limiting some hiring, according to a new report from Bloomberg. The company has so far not done huge layoffs like Meta’s second big layoff, which was announced earlier today, but it’s still taking some measures to cut costs.

The autonomous car unit shares its parent company, Alphabet, with Google, which in January cut over 12,000 jobs or about six percent of its workforce. The Information reports that after a new round of layoffs affecting primarily engineers, Waymo has let go of about 8 percent of the people working there.

Like the other recent tech layoffs, it’s a sharp turn from a few years ago — in 2017, Bloomberg reported some Waymo staffers were quitting because the jobs paid so well.

After cutting 20 percent of its workforce in October, the telehealth company is now reportedly laying off another 15 percent. The company is under investigation for how it perscribed controlled drugs like Adderall or Xanax.

According to a report from The Financial Times, Meta employees say things are “still a mess” and that “zero work” is getting done because the company hasn’t provided clear guidance surrounding budgets for various projects.

Meanwhile, morale remains low as staffers prep for another round of layoffs as part of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s plans to cut costs across the company, which the FT says could occur around March.

Yahoo is reportedly laying off around 20 percent of its workforce, including 1,600 people in its ad tech department, according to Axios.

It’s not the only tech company making cuts today — Deliveroo is getting rid of around 350 jobs, and both GitLab and GitHub are laying off staff. The latter is also planning to close all its offices and go fully remote.

The company reportedly told employees that it’d be cutting 500 positions, according to Reuters. It’s another entry for the sad yet informative big tech layoff tracker.