Despite a strong financial performance, Meta is going for another round of layoffs with both roles and teams across the group affected.

Changes appear to be pretty widespread and not targeted at any one area as Meta has set out to reduce its labor cost across the board. In the process, 100 roles are being cut.

Some of the affected are reverse engineering legend Jane Manchun Wong, who has been an invaluable source of information for SMT in the past years.
Wong had only spent a relatively short period within Meta's payroll, where she primarily focuses on Threads.

Meta issued a statement about the latest batch of staff layoffs, saying:

A small number of teams at Meta are aligning their resources to support long-term strategic objectives and location strategy, meaning maybe a relocation from one place to another or a new role for some members in their organization. In cases such as this, when a role is eliminated, we also invest work in additional opportunities for affected employees.

So, hence the affected staff will ideally be reassigned, but the new cuts reflect that the company is looking to maximize efficiency and cut cumulative bloat which has made the company frown in the past.

Meta has already cut about 20,000 jobs last year under the umbrella of its "Year of Efficiency" program, citing the reason that Meta has become too bloated, especially due to the COVID downturn, and thus needed to refocus and realign with the requirements of the modern market.

It came after Elon Musk made his massive staff cuts at Twitter - now X, whose decision many felt would be the trigger for wider-cutbacks in the technology industry.

And yet, alongside all this, Meta's financials have remained strong. In 2023, Meta brought in $134 billion in revenue, growing 16% from the year prior, and is forecast to see similar increases again in 2024.

So in terms of business strength, Meta remains stable, though ongoing reassessment and rationalization of costs are also part of this.

The latest cuts don't seem symptomatic of broader issues with the company, and again aren't targeted on any one area. But they do show that Meta is becoming even more focused on its bottom-line performance and making sure that its costs do not get out of hand.

Well, that is except for its VR push, which has cost it billions with little to show for it so far.

When you're taking a $50 billion hit on VR development, crunching the numbers likely gets more critical with time.