Meta employees comment on social media after recent layoffs

Yahoo Finance tech reporter Allie Garfinkle discusses Meta's latest round of layoffs, the company's culture, and Meta stock movement.

Video Transcript

- Meanwhile, Meta's stock moving to the upside today. The company-- beginning its latest round of layoffs, and former employees have taken to LinkedIn to announce that they've been laid off. Yahoo Finance tech reporter Allie Garfinkle here has the latest. Now, Ali, you've spoken to some of these former employees. What are they saying?

ALLIE GARFINKLE: Hi, Rochelle. So, you're right, I've actually been chasing around a number of these employees for the last 24 hours, really trying to get a sense of what happened, how it happened. And the message I'm getting from them is that even though this is officially the last round of layoffs that came from the plan that started back in March, this was pretty brutal, and in part, it's because there were cuts in areas that were previously thought of as essential, areas like marketing, user experience, engineering, whole comms teams slashed in half or almost completely.

I've also confirmed with a couple of people that Reality Labs was affected, engineers in hot areas like AI were affected, and even managers were affected in what internally some people have been calling "the flattening." Though it's kind of a coy joke, a lot of employees described a company that's in the midst of a massive cultural change. That cultural change did start back last year when COO Sheryl Sandberg, now former COO Sheryl Sandberg left the company.

And what they've said is that the company has become more tense. It's become more openly competitive between groups, and it's also become more impersonal. One worker told me that these cultural changes are encapsulated in how he was laid off.

This is what he said to me, "I woke up in the morning and saw the email. My manager reached out to me, but refused to get on a Zoom call with me, saying we should email. I could never imagine that happening when I joined a year ago. This made me feel better about being done with what Meta, me thinking, wow, maybe I don't want to be a part of this."

Rochelle, the markets have rewarded Meta's cuts, right, stock up more than 100% year to date, cutting at least $10 billion out of the company's expenses forecast. But a lot of these conversations for me, at least, have left me thinking that Meta is perhaps changing permanently.

- It's interesting because it started out as this year of efficiency. And now, you're not really sure what the longer game is here. And obviously, stock prices being rewarded, but looking at the human beings behind this. So then is this the end of Meta's layoffs necessarily?

ALLIE GARFINKLE: That's tricky, isn't it, Rochelle? Because you're right, it is the year of efficiency. It was the year of efficiency. It still remains as far as I can tell, the year of efficiency. And though officially for all intents and purposes, from what I know, from what everyone I've spoken to knows, this is the end of Meta's layoffs.

However, I think we can overestimate how much these expenses have helped Meta in the public markets, how much they've helped its image on Wall Street. So my take, and this is just my read, I think if they had to do more layoffs, they absolutely would.

- Especially as they step up their AI capabilities as well. It'd be interesting to see where that goes. Allie Garfinkle, thank you so much for that update.