Tech layoffs continue as Zuckerberg warns Facebook employees to brace for “one of the worst downturns in recent history”

On Tuesday, June 28, 2020, Tesla laid off hundreds of employees on its Autopilot team and closed its San Mateo office in California. 200 employees were let go, according to Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter. The news came two weeks after Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company was planning to lay off 10% of Tesla’s total workforce due to a “super bad feeling” he has about the economy.

The ongoing inflation, coupled with fear of recession, has caused tech executives to impose a hiring freeze and other cost-cut measures as tech companies announced a slew of job cuts. Some executives attributed the ongoing layoffs to a possible recession, and the need to manage the company’s burn rate and increase efficiency.

According to Reuters, Facebook’s Meta has stopped the plans to hire engineers by at least 30% this year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees on Thursday. Zuckerberg said that Meta has reduced its target for hiring engineers in 2022 to around 6,000-7,000, down from an initial plan to hire about 10,000 new engineers.

Zuckerberg also warned Meta’s employees to brace for a deep economic downturn.

“If I had to bet, I’d say that this might be one of the worst downturns that we’ve seen in recent history,” Zuckerberg told workers in a weekly employee Q&A session, audio of which was heard by Reuters.

He also added, “Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here,” adding that “part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might decide that this place isn’t for you, and that self-selection is OK with me.”

Tesla and Meta are just two of the many tech companies that have laid off their employees in recent months. As of June 27, at least 22,000 workers in the U.S. tech sector have been laid off in mass job cuts, according to layoff tracking data from CrunchBase. More tech companies are also planning to trim their workforces to counter market challenges amid the global economic downturn.