Did Meta pull the plug on the Metaverse?

Plus other insights from Meta's just-published California WARN notices

Meta has called 2023 the “year of efficiency.” A major pillar of the strategy for this increase in efficiency is a culling of middle management, and a flattening of the company’s org structure. WARNTracker previously reported that earlier Meta layoffs did not seem to be aligned with this stated goal: for every manager laid off in Meta’s previous rounds, 18.6 individual contributors were affected.

However, it appears that this trend has sharply reversed in the most recent round of layoffs. Although the majority of affected employees from this most recent round were individual contributors, the skew is far less extreme that it had been in the past.

Additionally, VR (virtual reality) and AR ( augmented reality) leadership were some of the hardest hit.

Here are the things that most stood out to us as we analyzed Meta’s most recent WARN notices:

1. VR & AR were heavily impacted: nearly 15% of affected employees were on VR/AR teams - by far the largest concentration of any business unit that we see in these records. By comparison, 8.5% were on infrastructure teams, 4% were on ads, and 6% were on AI teams.

2. These layoffs have a very different makeup than the wave in November: This time, 39% of the affected employees were in management, compared to just 8% in the 2022 layoffs.

3. VR & AR were especially focused on management: While 39% of the overall company’s layoffs impacted management, a whopping 68% of those affected on VR & AR teams are in management

4. Technical Project Managers were extremely heavily impacted. TPMs are far less numerous than other functions like software engineers and designers, but they accounted for over 9% of those affected by layoffs

To look at the full dataset, check out the full report on WARNTracker here

Some caveats about the data:

Caveat 1: These records are from California WARN notices, so only reflect employees laid off in California.

Caveat 2: The records that have been published so far reflect a total of 1,506 affected employees in the latest round. There may be more to come, in which case we will publish updated metrics

Caveat 3: Some of the team names are ambiguous or generic, and we therefore did not map them to specific business units

You can explore the data here