Recently leaked internal Facebook memos have revealed that the company is implementing a hiring freeze due to its failure to hit revenue targets. The Masters of the Universe continue to struggle with Apple’s privacy changes, which have damaged Mark Zuckerberg’s ability to suck up the personal data of users from their iPhones.
Business Insider reports that Facebook is enacting a massive hiring freeze and reducing hiring targets in a strategy that will impact “almost every team across the company.” This information comes from leaked internal memos sent to employees by executives this week.
This is a surprising decision from Facebook which has been overhauling its company in recent years, rebranding as Meta and vowing to focus on building “the Metaverse.” The company plans to build a digital reality and hardware to seamlessly access it, but the business pivot is reportedly becoming costly. Combined with an almost 40 percent decline in stock value this year, company CFO David Wehner announced that the firm is “reprioritizing.”
Breitbart News previously reported that according to internal reports, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has become increasingly obsessed with the idea of a digital metaverse, to the point where many of his employees are becoming frustrated and annoyed with the concept. According to a former director-level employee who recently left the company, it’s “the only thing Mark wants to talk about.”
Now, due to “slower revenue growth than anticipated,” Facebook is implementing a company-wide hiring freeze and doesn’t intend to meet hiring goals set at the start of the year. According to the memo, the company’s problems are due to the Apple privacy changes, the war in Ukraine, and the “general macroeconomic environment.”
The memo from company CFO David Wehner reads in part:
While we’re still going through our reprioritization, we know this will have an effect on hiring for the rest of the year. We came into 2022 with really aggressive growth targets and have hired at an incredible pace this year so far — we hired more engineers in Q1 than all of 2021. We’ve brought thousands of talented people into the company that are helping us work towards our ambitious goals and 2022 priorities. However, as we look towards the second half, we’re going to adjust those targets in a couple of ways:
- Reducing our hiring targets for 2022. This means hiring fewer people than we initially forecast. We’re still working out what this means for each org, but this will affect almost every team in the company. We’re entering into the H2 planning cycle, and this will be an opportunity to reprioritize work to make sure we’re all focused on the most important things and the top priorities for the company. Your org leaders will follow up with more information over the coming days and weeks, but today we’re announcing some changes on the Engineering side — look out for a post in Engineering FYI for details.
- Reviewing headcount allocation to make sure it’s aligned to our top company priorities given our modified hiring targets. This will help us resource the projects that we’re prioritizing for the rest of the year. You’ll learn more about this from your functional and org leads over the next couple of weeks.
Read more at Business Insider here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com