MENLO PARK, Calif. – The first day of the work week brings the final day of employment for approximately 3,600 Meta employees. Beginning at 5 a.m. on Monday, pink slips went out to what the company calls the “lowest performers,” in an effort to “move them out faster.”

“It appears as though they are facing some really serious financial hurdles,” said Prof. James Mohs, a business lecturer at the University of New Haven. “Not only did they do rank-and-file, but they did C-suite executives. So that’s eliminating, trading more efficiencies if you will.”

‘Performance terminations’

What we know:

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, classified the cuts that impact countries across the globe as “performance terminations.” U.S. workers get the bad news now. Employees in more than a dozen other countries in Europe, Asia and Africa get let-go notices from Feb. 11-18.

Meta staffers in Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands are exempt from the cuts “due to local regulations,” according to published reports that quoted company internal emails.

“They have agreements with the governments to do certain things. And it’s more national than it is individual,” said Mohs.

Company executives said they’ll expedite the hiring of machine learning engineers and other business-critical roles.

Industry expert perspective

What they’re saying:

Some industry experts said employees who have pushed back against returning to full-time office work are being targeted by this second round of Meta reductions. From 2022-23, the company sacked about a quarter of its workforce, or 21,000 people.

“They’re targeting the low performers. Those that are not performing up to the standards. Now, there’s another blurb that says Mr. Zuckerberg has raised the standards. Low performing could be anything from not coming into the office and not interacting with people. You know where I’m going with that. To simply working from home and not doing much,” said Mohs.

Some experts said work-from-home costs companies productivity, and many are, or soon will, move completely away from that option.

“If the world is changing, which it sure the heck is for the technology business, getting everybody all in a room to figure out how we’re gonna do things differently is really important. And even just bringing everybody in for a meeting won’t do it. People have to hang out together and cope with the changes,” said Dr. Robert Chapman Wood, a strategic management professor at San Jose State University.

Despite the layoffs, Meta still has about 1,000 job openings in California. 

There’s no timeline for when hiring will begin for new workers in business-critical roles, or how many people will be brought on-board

Big picture view:

Meta, based in Menlo Park, isn’t the only Silicon Valley company to be laying off workers.

Workday, based in Pleasanton, and Salesforce, based in San Francisco, also announced layoffs this month, citing a desire to invest more in artifical intelligence. 

Jesse Gary is a reporter based in the station’s South Bay bureau. Follow him on Instagram at @jessegontv and on Facebook at @JesseKTVU.