Managers at Meta looking for a promotion in the next year or two may be stuck where they are as the company continues to change under a new era of austerity.
Maher Saba, head of engineering and remote presence at Meta, formerly known as Facebook, last week told managers there would be new criteria that will make it harder for them to rise up the ranks, according to three people familiar with the company.
Company executives have been working in recent months to comply with a mandate from founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to streamline operations as he declared 2023 Meta's Year of Efficiency. Saba is seen as a keen enforcer of a new culture of "intensity," having told managers last year that they need to weed out underperformers.
Efficiency at Meta has meant months of cutting costs, "flattening" organizational structures, and layoffs, with more than 20,000 people losing their jobs since November. Headcount is now down to about 65,000 employees from nearly 90,000 at its peak in mid-2022. In a March post regarding layoffs, Zuckerberg noted interest rates and market volatility created a need for a more austere attitude. "We should prepare ourselves for the possibility that this new economic reality will continue for many years," he said.
In an effort to maintain Meta's new, flatter structure, Saba said promotions within management levels at Meta will be based less on team size going forward and that manager promotions will also be less frequent, two people familiar with the changes said. The comments were made in an internal Workplace forum for engineering managers. A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment.
With an ongoing slowdown in hiring at the company, managers will simply not be able to hire as much as they have in previous years. Saba's note came about three weeks after Meta's performance review cycle for the first half of the year was completed, a time which can often lead to expectations for promotions and bonuses among employees who received positive reviews.
In a post to the app Blind, in a group only accessible to Meta employees, a worker said Saba's note meant there would be "no manager growth for 2-3 years." Another worker commented that taking away team size as a promotion metric means "a manager's career is just up to their ability to navigate politics from now on."
Moving away from hiring incentives for management is needed at the company, according to a high-level employee who recently left Meta. "It's been a long time coming," the person said. The person noted that Meta's criteria for promotions within management have been so reliant on hiring that "it was harder to get promoted if you didn't meet the right size ratios, even if you had good product or business impact."
It's a 180-degree turn for Meta, which spent years in hyper-growth mode and "rigorously supported" hiring-based promotion criteria, the person added. For example, to become an engineering manager a person had to show they previously "accumulated" the right size team as a high-level engineer, as Insider previously reported. To move from a manager title to a director role, a person had to have hired managers under them from outside the company. To move up the director ranks, a person needed to have managed their own team of directors. All of that meant more hiring, the former employee explained.
Such incentives resulted in widespread "bloat" at the company, which for years wanted to show Wall Street it was a growing organization through ever-increasing employee numbers. As investors decided last year profits were more important than growth, management ranks became a target for Zuckerberg. He said early this year he no longer wanted his company to be one of "managers managing managers"
Since then, Meta eliminated many manager roles, moved down many existing managers to individual contributor roles, and overall "flattened" its organizational structure to remove layers of management. The new decision to promote fewer managers will make the reduction in Meta's management ranks more permanent.
Are you a Meta employee or someone else with insight to share? Contact Kali Hays at khays@insider.com, on secure messaging app Signal at 949-280-0267, or through Twitter DM at @hayskali. Reach out using a non-work device.
Contact Hugh Langley via encrypted email (hlangley@protonmail.com) or encrypted messaging apps Signal/Telegram (+1 628-228-1836).
