Behind the scenes of the layoffs at Meta (Facebook)

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Like many of its tech counterparts, Meta carried out mass layoffs on Wednesday, November 9th. Of the group's 80,000 employees, 11,000 were notified by email that they were being laid off. Gary Yuen, Product Manager for Facebook, was one of them. He reveals the behind-the-scenes story of this dismissal.

Tech companies are starting to pay for their strategic missteps. For Meta, it's primarily its investments in the metaverse that are estonia mobile database investors. It must be said that the group used to count on 500,000 active users per month. Today, there are half that number. Worse still, Horizon Worlds isn't retaining the users who try it. They often abandon this virtual universe after a month.

As a result, Meta's stock price is plummeting. In one year, the group's valuation has fallen by 65.68%. Meta is now worth $310 billion. A corollary consequence is Mark Zuckerberg's plunge in the ranking of the world's richest men. The entrepreneur owns a significant number of Meta shares. In one year, his fortune has fallen by $81 billion. His net worth, according to Bloomberg , is now worth $44.5 billion.

Meta: dismissals without notice
Meta carried out layoffs in the same way as other tech giants (Uber, Twitter, etc.). Employees were notified by email that morning that they would no longer have access to their computers and email accounts that day. The dismissed employees weren't even able to say goodbye to colleagues, some of whom they had worked with for several years.

In the United States, the law offers far fewer worker protections than in France. However, federal legislation governs mass layoffs, which is the case here. While notice is not required to lay off employees, mass layoffs require employers to give their employees 60 days' notice, a precaution Meta failed to take before laying off 11,000 employees.

The testimony of Gary Yuen, Product Manager at Facebook
Among those laid off from Meta Group is Gary Yuen. Gary was a Product Manager at Facebook. He worked for Mark Zuckerberg and his social network for over three and a half years. He too was let go without any notice. On LinkedIn, the former Meta employee shared a poignant account of how these layoffs unfolded, as well as the impact they had on employees, a dimension that is too often overlooked. Here is a translation of his message:

" How do I tell my two daughters that I've been fired? Last Wednesday, I was one of the 11,000 employees fired from Meta.

In recent weeks, I've started to get anxious as Twitter, Stripe, Lyft, and other major companies announce layoff plans. I couldn't help but wonder if the same would happen to Facebook. I was worried.

At 5 a.m. on Wednesday morning, my room was still dark and cold. My wife and two daughters were sleeping peacefully. I anxiously picked up my work phone and refreshed my emails on Outlook. Meta informed me that I was being laid off, and I was stunned.