Longest Lay-off Notice in History, by Mark Zuckerberg

According to Google, a high school essay is around 300-800 words. A graduate school admission essay is around 500-1000 words, while an undergraduate university essay is typically between 1500 and 2000 words. Back in November 2022, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid off more than 11,000 workers amid faltering revenue and recession fears. He released a statement in the Meta Newsroom explaining his decision. It was a fairly lengthy, 1,181 words. Certainly not a university essay length, but a worthy performance. But then, just this week, he decided to lay off another 10,000 workers. This time though, he published a Facebook post, here, on the 14th of March. Here it is in full, zoomed-out of course. It’s a monster! I popped it into a word processor and counted the words. It comes in at a massive 2,202 words, well and truly in university essay territory.

ZUCK’S MEGA LONG LAY-OFF NOTICE
https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/pfbid024V3cgE77Y464WnvG39KMcAmevdzUDUMRieTEG7orCAJ81nQ6yfGkEBPWWLwSyVZ5l

I won’t read the entire essay here, we’d be here all week, but I’ll just go over some of the highlights that would indicate to me if I was a Facebook employee that I’m about to lose my job.

“Year of Efficiency” – I think that should sound alarm bells to anybody reading this that there are lay-offs coming. Efficiency in the workplace never means efficiency – it means cutting costs. And what’s the best way to cut costs? To cut you, of course!

“The goals of this work are: To improve our financial performance in a difficult environment so we can execute our long term vision.” Difficult environment. Execute. Long term vision. Obviously they mean they’re going to get rid of you!

“Improve organisational efficiency”. “Garbage collect unnecessary processes” – Yes, that means you’re disposable. You’re metaphorically going to be put into a bin.

“I know many of you are energised by this” – Really? “Restructuring plans focused on flattening our orgs” – Yep, a steamroller’s being brought in to iron out this mess.

“Cancelling lower priority projects”. “Reducing our hiring rates”. “Reduce the size of our recruiting team”. Don’t worry, we’ll let you know tomorrow. “restructurings and layoffs”.

“Goodbye to talented and passionate colleagues” – Bye! Apparently, you’re not that talented or passionate. “Efficiency timelines”. “Flatter is faster”. Again with the flatness analogy. “In our Year of Efficiency, we will make our organisation flatter by removing multiple layers of management.”

“Leaner is better”. Yes, a meat analogy. We’ve got to cut the superfluous fat! “Since we reduced our workforce last year, one surprising result is that many things have gotten faster.” Oh, maybe we should cut some more workers?

“Profitability enables innovation”. “When I wrote my first letter to investors during our IPO, I described a basic principle that is still true today: We don't build services to make money; we make money to build better services.” Duh! “New economic reality”.

“I recognise that sharing plans for restructuring and layoffs months in advance creates a challenging period. But last fall, we heard feedback that you wanted more transparency sooner into any restructuring plans, so that's what I'm trying to provide here.”

“I encourage each of you to focus on what you can control. That is, do great work and support your teammates.” And if you don’t, you’re sacked!

And finally, if you really don’t know what the letter is about: “Overall, we expect to reduce our team size by around 10,000 people and to close around 5,000 additional open roles that we haven't yet hired.”

And that’s how a billionaire writes a dismissal letter. Use lots of business lingo and euphemisms. Make sure to compliment the people you’re sacking. And most importantly, write thousands and thousands of words that probably none of your employees will read.

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