Despite tempered hiring plans, Meta still bets on metaverse

Meta, Facebook’s parent company, announced it would reduce its engineer hiring goals by 30% this year. It will recruit between 6,000 and 7,000 engineers, down from an envisioned 10,000.

Why should we care?
Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg put it bluntly during a weekly Q&A with company employees: "Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be here." Zuckerberg was implying that some hires weren’t a right fit for the company, which is hoping to “[turn] up the heat a little bit” and have its employees do more on a smaller budget. But it might make sense to interpret Zuck’s quote differently in the context of larger strategic pivots: Meta is fully abandoning certain key projects to prioritize other initiatives, including ones with unproven results. The company’s market cap has more than halved over the past year, in part due to data privacy regulations that have blunted Meta’s ad revenue stream, and after a first-ever quarterly decline in use of its Facebook app. For a while, the company eyed crypto as a finance-forward lifeline to rescue its profits, but just months after its Diem fiasco, the company shut down its Novi crypto wallet last week. It’s now charting full steam ahead with a product that competes with TikTok, Reels, as a vehicle for ad revenue, and continuing to double down on the metaverse, a space supposedly ripe for monetization but with unproven demand. With these adjusted hiring goals, it seems Meta is putting more of its eggs in one basket—which may help revenues surge dramatically if the metaverse takes off, or make Meta’s market cap collapse even further if this risky gamble fails to earn returns.