Meta PlatformsImage Credit source: Jens Büttner/picture alliance via Getty Images
This year is proving to be no less than a nightmare for professionals working in the IT sector. Meta (formerly known as Facebook), one of the world’s largest tech companies, has once again decided to show the way out to its employees on a large scale. The company is going to lay off about 16,000 people in the coming few months. This is not the condition of just one company, but the entire tech industry is currently going through a major change and massive retrenchment.
Big round of layoffs in Meta
According to a Reuters report, Meta is going to start its biggest restructuring process till date. Its first phase is expected to start from May 20, in which 8,000 employees will be directly affected. According to the filing of December 31 last year, about 79,000 people were working in the company. Now the question arises that why are such a large number of jobs being lost? The direct answer is Artificial Intelligence (AI). Company chief Mark Zuckerberg is placing heavy emphasis on AI, generative tools and machine learning infrastructure. The company wants to increasingly hand over its operations to automated software, due to which the need for human workforce is decreasing. The report suggests that this trend of layoffs will continue in the second half of the year also.
Not just Meta, Disney and Marvel are also in trouble
This job crisis is not limited to just social media giants. The big entertainment company Disney has also announced mass layoffs. Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro himself has announced that the company is laying off about 1,000 employees from different divisions. This is being considered the biggest internal change in recent years in Disney’s history. ‘Marvel Studios’ has been hit the hardest by these layoffs, where about 8 percent of its employees are being laid off.
Employees upset with Oracle’s rules
Here, the attitude of the well-known American IT company Oracle is further increasing the problems of the employees who have lost their jobs. Oracle has laid off 30,000 of its employees worldwide, including about 12,000 employees in India. The most surprising thing is the condition that Oracle has put in front of the fired employees. The company has made it clear that unless the employees sign the documents sent through ‘DocuSign’, they will not be given any severance package (compensation). That means, no signature, no money. The company has not yet issued any official statement on this entire matter or its strict conditions. According to ‘Layoffs.fyi’, a website that monitors tech layoffs around the world, 73,212 tech employees have lost their jobs so far this year.
