“They’re saying it’s ‘Hunger Games’ meets ‘Lord of the Flies,’ where everyone is trying to prove their worth to management.”
Hunger Games
As it turns out, firing nearly 30 percent of a workforce over the course of just six months isn’t exactly great for worker morale.
According to a report from The New York Times, the “metamates,” who have survived Meta-formerly-Facebook’s recent workforce cullings — roughly 26,000 jobs in total — are struggling to navigate a work culture plagued by mass firings, cost-cuts, and “absentee” bosses.
“So many of the employees feel like they’re in limbo right now,” Erin Sumner, who was laid off from Facebook in November, told the NYT. “They’re saying it’s ‘Hunger Games’ meets ‘Lord of the Flies,’ where everyone is trying to prove their worth to management.”
No Cereal
Though Silicon Valley has been hit with one mass layoff after another, Meta seems to have had a particularly rough time, with its stock, sliding 43 percent from where it was just 19 months ago, according to the report.
In response to his company’s woes, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg — who notably pivoted away from the metaverse to focus on generative AI to appease investors — has taken to calling 2023 Meta’s “year of efficiency,” a mission characterized by leaner teams and broader cost-cutting.
But that efficiency is seemingly making a huge mess of the company’s operations.
Per the NYT, scared workers are being asked to justify their roles while struggling to make themselves look busy to navigate what one unnamed employee described to the paper as a “cutthroat” environment.
“Raise your hand if you know who is getting fired?” one employee reportedly wrote in an engineer chatroom earlier this month, as quoted by the NYT. “Fire emoji if you think it’s a dumpster fire” — a message that was immediately bombarded with fire emojis.
Meta’s other cost cuts also have employees less than thrilled, with internal chat rooms reviewed by the NYT showing workers frustrated by a recent lack of in-office cereal, unstocked kitchens, and downgraded cafeteria options. Meanwhile, workers also seem pretty pissed that most of the firm’s top execs, who live all over the world, are never in the office.
In any case, while some might argue that “no cereal” is a far cry from the “Hunger Games,” working at Meta does sound pretty miserable these days.
READ MORE: Mass Layoffs and Absentee Bosses Create a Morale Crisis at Meta [The New York Times]
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