According to reports, Meta would be preparing a major restructuring that would involve laying off around 20% of its employees worldwide. This measure, which would affect about 16,000 people, does not yet have concrete dates, but the management teams are already working on the strategies to execute it. The context is one of adjustments after a period of accelerated growth.
Impact on development projects and the metaverse 😮
A reduction of this magnitude would force the prioritization or freezing of technical initiatives. Reality Labs development teams, the metaverse department, could be affected, slowing down the iteration of hardware and software. The reallocation of resources could focus on core products like the family of apps (Facebook, Instagram) and its AI infrastructure, leaving experimental projects on the back burner.
Zuckerberg seeks to optimize the reality of his employees 😬
It seems that the metaverse vision now includes a more austere concept: the meta-layoff. While Reality Labs spends billions creating digital avatars, the company applies a very analog solution to save costs: making real people disappear from the payroll. A not very immersive way of showing that, in the end, the most virtual project turns out to be the bottom line.