Meta fired about two dozen employees in Los Angeles for using food vouchers to buy personal or household items (pads, laundry detergent, or wine glasses). As noted by Arstechnica,ome employees pooled their money to buy more expensive goods, or ordered food at home in the evening instead of at the office.
The layoffs come amid wider cuts that include restructuring teams at WhatsApp, Instagram, and Reality Labs, the company’s augmented and virtual reality division.
Like most tech companies, Meta provides free meals for employees working in its offices — by providing credits, for example, to Uber Eats or Grubhub for office food delivery. Employees receive $20 for breakfast and $25 for dinner and lunch, while some employees «have abused the system for a long time» and have been reprimanded, but no dismissals have been made so far.
In one of the posts on the anonymous messaging platform Blind
Blind verifies whether a user works for a particular company, but does not require them to reveal their identity., a former Meta employee wrote that she used $25 in credit for items such as toothpaste and tea from a Rite Aid pharmacy. The woman indicated that she had a salary of $400,000 per year and added that the notice of dismissal looked «surreal» to her.
Meta refused to comment on the layoffs, but noted changes in the composition of the teams:
«Today, several Meta teams are making changes to ensure that resources are aligned with their long-term strategic goals. This includes moving some teams to other locations and moving some employees to other roles. When a position is eliminated, we work hard to find other opportunities for affected employees».
Zuckerberg has announced a reduction of about 21,000 jobs in two rounds of layoffs in 2022 and 2023, calling the latter a «year of» performance. He also canceled low-priority projects to accelerate slow growth and ease investor concerns over his expensive bet on the meta-universe.
Spelling error report
The following text will be sent to our editors: