Zuckerberg enters permanent efficiency mode at Meta and targets VPs

Mark Zuckerberg isn’t done. After laying off more than 20,000 employees in 2023, the supposed year of efficiency, Meta is now looking to fire dozens of company vice presidents.

According to a Business Insider report, citing three people with knowledge of what’s happening at Facebook’s parent company, Meta, executives are also facing the threat of being culled from the firm’s ranks.

Dozens of them might be forced to leave the tech giant in what would be Meta's third wave of layoffs. In 2022, the company eliminated 11,000 employees, and last year, the total number of workers who were let go reached more than 30,000.

Earlier this year, Zuckerberg said that the mass layoffs were being implemented because companies, including Meta, were trying to get back to efficiency after the e-commerce boom during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Employers “overbuilt” during the pandemic to meet the extra demand, but since life has gone back to normal, the problem of overstaffing has emerged, Zuckerberg said. Now, it looks like Meta’s boss has decided that the firm needs to whittle down its upper ranks, too.

This means that Meta is now looking to lay off the very same directors or vice presidents who had to make lists of lower-ranked employees that could be let go, Business Insider said.

The problem is, of course, that Meta has simply created too many VP positions. If in previous years the company had about 180 vice presidents, the number of them peaked last year at around 300.

Zuckerberg is reportedly looking to reduce these ranks to 250 and will rely on midyear and annual performance reviews, which are usually conducted in the first quarter. Last year, Meta’s boss said he no longer wanted a company of “managers managing managers.”

Mass layoffs at Meta were among the largest in the tech industry, but other large firms, such as Google, Microsoft, and Tesla, also participated. In 2023 alone, more than 250,000 tech employees were let go.

Experts previously told Cybernews that a certain amount of rebalancing is definitely taking place with the advent of generative AI. However, even if some workers are losing their roles, generative-AI-related job posts have actually been increasing – and employees who lose positions are quickly hired for other types of jobs.

In other words, the tech sector is still looking quite healthy. Zuckerberg concurs: Meta’s stock reached an all-time high after he pleased investors by saying that the company was committing to a “leaner” operating structure and slow hiring.