Meta freezes hiring for shopping team, Messenger Kids, and other products

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

The teams it spun up early in the pandemic to compete with Zoom are among the products that Meta is pulling back on. The company recently paused the hiring of recruiters and low-level data scientists, in addition to a hiring freeze for certain engineering roles.

While the hiring freezes have caused employees to fear that layoffs are around the corner, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an internal all-hands meeting last Thursday that job cuts are not being planned. We are dialing growth to the levels that we think will be manageable over time.

Meta's leaders have recently told specific teams that they won't be able to hire new engineers or receive internal transfers. It's a sign that the specific products don't make money or aren't strategically important enough to keep investing in while the stock price is down. The product teams impacted by an engineering freeze include Facebook Dating and Gaming, Messenger Kids, the Commerce team, and the Remote Presence team.

The company is still actively recruiting for machine learning and artificial intelligence roles, according to a Meta spokesman.

The CTO of Inside Reality Labs, Andrew Bosworth, recently told employees that some projects will be deprioritized in favor of others. Employees won't be moved out of the division, which already totals over 17,000 people, and the specific team changes haven't been communicated internally yet.

Meta has been hurt by a combination of the rise of TikTok, a broader sell-off in tech stocks, and Apple's ad tracking changes that are costing the company billions of dollars in lost ad revenue. He tried to assure them that the company's rich balance sheet and billions of dollars in quarterly profit is in a strong place to navigate what many on Wall Street believe could be a lengthy downturn in the stock market.

Whenever we bring growth targets down, you always hear a lot of speculation, like, are we in trouble? He asked if something more dramatic was going to happen. I want to be clear that we are in a very strong position and have a very healthy business, and we are still growing quickly.