Meta's Massive Layoffs: Engineers and Managers Targeted

Meta recently conducted a wave of layoffs affecting thousands of employees, with a particularly severe impact on managers and software engineers. In California and Washington, these two categories accounted for more than half of the job cuts, according to official documents.

Last April, Meta eliminated approximately 8,000 positions. Documents obtained by Business Insider reveal that out of the 4,665 employees laid off in California and Washington, over 1,400 were managers, nearly half of whom were in software engineering. Individual software engineers were also heavily impacted, with nearly 1,000 layoffs.

These layoffs are part of a broader strategy by Meta to form smaller teams and integrate artificial intelligence more deeply into its operations. Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, had already expressed his desire to reduce the number of middle managers to avoid a culture of "managers managing managers." In April, he attributed these layoffs to the need to offset expenses related to AI, rather than automation itself.

In addition to managers and engineers, other roles were affected, including data scientists with 419 layoffs, and product management with 301 layoffs. In contrast, the marketing and sales departments were relatively spared, with fewer than 100 and 50 layoffs respectively.

The changes also include the closure of open positions and the reassignment of thousands of employees to critical business priorities. These adjustments come as Meta invests heavily in AI, reorganizing its teams around this technology. "AI builders" are now grouped into small units called "pods," and "AI weeks" are organized for staff. Jason Schloetzer, an associate professor at Georgetown University, emphasizes that the tech industry is now focusing more on revenue per employee, making large-scale hiring of engineers less justifiable in the AI era.