![]() ![]() ![]() My heart is in a million pieces, tomorrow will be weird, and our team will never truly be the same again. So many amazing people were laid off from Snap today. “Investor sentiment in Silicon Valley is the most negative since the dot-com crash,” venture capitalist David Sacks tweeted in May. Recent earnings reports from Twitter and Snap proved disappointing, and funding for start-ups has started to evaporate. At many tech companies, once-skyrocketing stock prices are falling back to earth. Those workplace changes reflect a shifting economic landscape. “There are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here,” he told staff, adding that he’ll now be “turning up the heat.” In an internal call reviewed by The Verge, Zuckerberg warned that many employees haven’t been working as hard as they’ll soon need to be. Bonus vacation days introduced during the pandemic are now being phased out, and the free laundry and dry cleaning services it once offered employees are long gone. Yet amid economic struggles of its own - a recent earnings report revealed a first-ever year-over-year drop in quarterly revenue - Meta has cracked down on other COVID niceties. “Sometimes it’s actually better to not be in the office, because then people aren’t bugging you.” “Some types of work, especially software engineering, you can do pretty well from a lot of different places,” Zuckerberg remarked during a recent interview with podcaster Joe Rogan. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg is currently pivoting the company toward building a “metaverse” of immersive virtual worlds, and virtual offices are one of his favorite use cases to talk up. Meta has been relatively vocal about embracing remote work in the long term. But I certainly think there’s more concern over job stability than there was even, you know, six months ago.”Īt tech firms where telework is set to stick around permanently, managers are cracking down on other fronts. “I don’t think you can say that’s the same across the board for all workers in tech. “It’s very specific to the individual worker - the role they’re in, the skill-set that they have - in terms of the leverage they might have in their work-from-home situation,” Nedzhvetskaya said. Has the golden age of the tech job started to wane? Yet now, with belt-tightening on the rise, at Snap and elsewhere, that charmed lifestyle faces an uncertain future. A hiring surge spurred by demand for digital products and e-commerce left software engineers picking between competing job offers - or even working multiple gigs at once - while tech firms desperate to woo high-skilled staffers promised ever more generous perks, benefits and bonuses. Work-from-home went from a common part-time perk to obligatory. With humanity abruptly thrown into an era of Zoom calls, DoorDash deliveries and Peloton rides, software engineers and designers found their talents being sought after, accommodated and remunerated as never before. It’s a dramatic fall from grace for an industry that was, all things considered, a pretty great one to work in during the pandemic. And tech stocks, which are part of many employees’ compensation packages, are sinking. Microsoft, Netflix and Twitter have all gone even further and laid off staff, though none has cut its workforce as sharply as Snap. Meta Platforms - the umbrella company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp - has implemented a hiring freeze in certain divisions, as has Google. Snap isn’t the only tech firm where workers are currently taking a beating. ![]() A worker who wasn’t authorized to speak with the media said the atmosphere was downcast, with everyone knowing colleagues who would be affected. In the cafeteria of the company’s Santa Monica headquarters Wednesday morning, employees could be heard discussing the layoffs. But for employees lower in the corporate hierarchy, things aren’t so rosy. ![]()
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