Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook-owner Meta, told his employees on Thursday that Meta Platforms has cut plans to hire engineers by at least 30% this year. He even warned them to brace for a deep economic downturn.

HIGHLIGHTS
A cut-off by at least 30% in hiring would be visible by this year.
Meta would bring in more aggressive goals in the future for the staff.
The company has seen a loss, which has gone almost half its market value.

In a weekly employee Q&A session, Zuckerberg informed the workers, 'If I had to bet, I would say that this might be one of the worst downturns scenarios that we've seen in recent history.' 

Meta had confirmed in broad terms last month that they had paused the hiring session, but exact figures have not reported previously.

Well, it is visible that Meta has reduced its target for hiring engineers in 2022 to around 6,000-7,000, down from an initial plan to hire about 10,000 new engineers, as per Zuckerberg.

Also Read: Facebook Parent 'Meta' Looking for Tools of Money-Making for its Metaverse

In addition to reducing hiring, he added that the company was leaving certain positions unfilled and would 'turn up the heat' on performance management to swipe out those staff who were unable to meet higher aggressive goals.

Zuckerberg stated that 'Realistically, there could be probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be here in the company.'

Well, he adds up by saying that 'It is part of my hope by raising expectations and having greater aggressive goals in future, and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit in the workspace, is that I think some of you might be able to decide that this place isn't for you, and then that self-selection is OK with me.' 

Also Read: Facebook Whistleblower Ideology to Train Lawyers for a Fight

The guidance from Meta executives is the latest rough forecast, as they have already moved to trim the costs across much of the company this year. Well, it is all because the ad sales are going down with the growth in users.  

Most of the tech companies have come across the board and have scaled back their ambitions in anticipation of a possible U.S. recession and the stock price at Meta has been more severe than at its competitors, like Apple and Google.

Meta, the world's biggest social media company has lost almost half of its market value this year. It happened after it experienced a quarterly decline for the first time on its flagship Facebook app.

It has calculated that around 80% of the growth came from Facebook since March.