“It’s a sad day, I was fired”: Meta employees’ social media messages

“My father was fired in 2008. I was 17. It was difficult for everyone. A little while ago I learned that I was fired from Meta. I have a beautiful 5 month old baby girl. I know you are not the only child of people laid off today. My heart is with all the colleagues from Meta, Twitter and Stripe who have lost their jobs today ”. The message appears on LinkedIn a few hours after Meta announced the firing of 11,000 people worldwide. 13% of her 87,314 employees. This is written by a human resources employee. Aaron Doran. He worked in Dublin. At the moment it is not clear whether Italian employees have also returned to the layoff plan. According to Italian Tech, there are about fifty employees between Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram in Italy.

In the posts more resignation than anger

In these hours on social media there are many messages of the same tenor. Engineers, developers, simple employees who have received a letter of dismissal from the holding company of Mark Zuckerberg. The posts don’t read anger. Rather resignation. Sometimes veiled optimism.

Coutney Taylor, HR, Austin, Texas based: “I was really hoping this day wouldn’t come. But unfortunately I was fired. Today the search for a new job begins. The only thing that comforts me is having established good relationships with colleagues over the years. I know they will help me ”. Hundreds of comments under each post.

Mark Zuckerberg takes responsibility. Is it the fault of the Metaverse?

In the letter to his employees, Mark Zuckerberg apologizes. He takes full responsibility for what is currently the biggest layoff plan in the tech industry. Arrived seven days after Twitter, which fired half of its staff to settle the accounts: 3,750 people. And that adds to the layoffs decided by other tech giants such as Stripe, Lyft, Snapchat. About 20,000 people have lost their jobs in the past two weeks. It is not excluded that others will be added to them.

Meta has cut a large portion of its employees between the human resources and augmented reality departments. The Metaverse. A bet that Zuckerberg strongly wanted. But that he burned 9 billion in cash in the first nine months of 2022. Too much for investors, unconvinced of the long-term plans of the Facebook founder. Fears that are added to the difficult time that the advertising market is experiencing, weighed down by inflation, by international tensions. And to the breath on the neck of the fierce competition of TikTok, very popular among the new generations, and therefore among advertisers.

“I can’t sleep. I might lose my job tomorrow.”

Last night a Twitter profile shared a message: “I can’t sleep, I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it. Tomorrow I could have a letter and lose my job in Meta, ”writes Brittney. No surname, but an engineer in Meta in the description of her biography.

Scrolling through the other messages shared with the hashtag #MetaLayoffs (Meta redundancies, ed), you will find dozens more. The most recent are those of those who discovered that they were not among the selected: “Thank God I still have a job”, writes a developer from San Francisco: “I am close to my colleagues who did not make it. Don’t worry, we will help you ”.

There are many job offers. TikTok and startups observe

They know that nothing is lost. In these hours, several TikTok human resources employees write direct messages to former employees of Meta and Twitter: “Send us a resume, we are hiring”. And ready at the window are hundreds of Silicon Valley startups that can access already trained talents, which until now they could not afford.

Companies that have collected liquidity in recent years from venture capital funds. But they do not have huge expenses to bear because they are still in the launch phase. They can still invest to develop their own products. And the engineers of the largest tech companies are a pool of incomparable professionalism. The cycle in the Bay Area seems ready to start again.

@arcamasilum