San Francisco, Sep 30 (UiTV/IANS) – Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made it clear that the social network is freezing hiring across the board, warning that more layoffs are in the pipeline.
According to The Verge, Zuckerberg made these comments during an internal call to employees.
Zuckerberg mentioned during the last Meta earnings call that “Our plan is to steadily reduce headcount growth over the next year. Many teams are going to shrink so we can shift energy to other areas.”
In May, Zuckerberg announced a hiring freeze affecting certain segments of Meta.
However, he has now expanded the hiring freeze across departments and verticals.
Facebook’s parent company Meta is currently reducing staff to cut costs amid the economic downturn, apparently putting some of them on traditional 30 to 60 days “lists” to find a new role within the company or leave.
Meta plans to cut costs by at least 10 per cent in the coming months and has put out more and more workers whose jobs are being eliminated on its traditional “30-day list”, according to earlier reports.
Meta has a “long practice” where employees whose roles are eliminated are subject to termination if they can’t find a new job internally within a month.
The Mark Zuckerberg-run company had 83,553 employees at the end of the second quarter this year.
As Big Tech companies lay off employees and freeze new hirings, Zuckerberg said in July that the company’s plan is to steadily reduce headcount growth over the next year.
Admitting that the social network has entered an economic downturn that will have a broad impact on the digital advertising business, Zuckerberg said that many “teams are going to shrink so we can shift energy to other areas inside the company”.
Wipro sacked 300 employees for moonlighting:
Last week Wipro had terminated 300 employees found to be moonlighting with its key rivals at the same time.
Speaking at the All India Management Association (AIMA) National Management Convention, its Chairman Rishad Premji termed moonlighting is a complete violation of integrity “in its deepest form”.
“The reality is that there are people today working for Wipro and working directly for one of our competitors and we have actually discovered 300 people in the last few months who are doing exactly that,” the Wipro Chairman said.
The company has now terminated their employment for “act of integrity violation”.
Premji recently said that the concept of a second job in addition to the regular job is “plain and simple” cheating.
“There is a lot of chatter about people moonlighting in the tech industry. This is cheating — plain and simple,” he had tweeted.
Amid the brouhaha over moonlighting in India, cloud major IBM last week made it clear that the practice is not ethical and the company does not promote such behaviour at workplace.
IBM India Managing Director, Sandip Patel, said that the company’s position is exactly that of the overall industry in the country.
“All of our workers when they are employed, they sign an agreement which says that they are going to be working full-time for IBM. So moonlighting is not ethically right for them to get into,” he said.
Moonlighting allows employees to work outside their primary working hours.
Some startups and unicorns like Swiggy have encouraged the practice, while most of the traditional companies are calling it cheating.
With IT major Wipro sacking 300 employees for moonlighting — working for rival firms while drawing full-time salaries at the software firm — industry experts on Thursday said IT companies must clarify their policies regarding employment and moonlighting as work-from-home (WFH) culture in the IT sector has apparently given rise to such work practices.
Amid the debate on what is right and what is wrong for employees who are at home and working, some leading IT and Cloud firms, afraid of backlash from employees if they go on record, told IANS that such practices are actually unethical, and WFH has kept their hands tied as they cannot monitor what their employees are doing from the boundaries of their homes.
C.P. Gurnani, CEO and Managing Director of Tech Mahindra, has come in support of moonlighting from the big tech enterprises, saying that “If someone is meeting the efficiency and productivity norms, and wants to make some extra money, I have no problem. I would like to make it a policy. So, if you want to do it, cheers to that, but be open about it.”
Shrijay Sheth, Founder, Legalwiz.in, told IANS that the issue around moonlighting is beyond just having multiple jobs.
“It is a larger issue that employers face around work ethics, integrity, and priorities. With work from home being mainstream now, moonlighting is a common secondary revenue stream. While many are ok with employees being involved in alternative activities in extended work hours, some moonlighters are actually double dipping,” Sheth elaborated.
There are data-sharing and intellectual property (IP) stealing fears too.
Most of the new-age businesses are IP, know-how and data driven, and there is always a risk of data and knowledge drain, more specifically when the moonlighting is done for competing companies.
“Many businesses rightly expect their employees to be the advocates of their brand. Many even do not claim employment credentials on their public social profiles, simply because they run a competing ‘freelance’ business in the same domain. It is becoming highly common in ITES and other services industries,” Sheth noted.
It was on-demand delivery platform Swiggy that introduced a new “Moonlighting” policy last month for its employees that will let them take up external projects to make more money.
Swiggy said this could encompass activity outside of office hours or on weekends that does not impact their productivity on the full-time job or have a conflict of interest with the company’s business in any way.
And all hell broke loose.
Mohandas Pai, former Director of Infosys, feels that “moonlighting is not cheating”.
“Employment is a contract between an employer who pays me for working for them for ‘n’ number of hours a day. Now what I do after that time is my freedom, I can do what I want,” according to Pai.
TCS and Infosys are also concerned:
TCS has also called moonlighting an ethical issue. Infosys issued a letter to employees strictly prohibiting them from practicing moonlighting, saying “No two-timing, no moonlighting, and no double lives”.
The IT major has sent an email to its employees, saying it is mandatory now for all to work from the office at least three days a week.
Amid the brouhaha over moonlighting in India, cloud major IBM last week made it clear that the practice is not ethical and the company does not promote such behaviour at the workplace.
According to Sheth, it is best for the businesses to clarify their policies.
“Employment contracts should explicitly define employers’ tolerance to moonlighting and provide guidelines as to what is acceptable, if at all. That can help in formally easing up the conflicts and frictions around the issue,” he noted.
However, a shocked workforce of millions, working from home, can revolt against their bosses if more firing episodes happen within the IT firms’ ranks.
