Meta says it doesn't know its ideal size as it prepares to lay off 10% of its entire staff [Business Insider]

When a company the size of Meta admits it doesn’t know what its “ideal size” should be, you know we’re in strange territory. That’s exactly what CFO Susan Li told analysts on the latest earnings call, just days before reports surfaced that the company is preparing to cut 10% of its entire workforce. Not 10% of a specific division, not performance-based pruning — 10% of everyone. That’s thousands of people, globally, with no clear finish line in sight.

Let’s sit with that contradiction for a second. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is simultaneously admitting strategic confusion and preparing one of the largest single-percentage layoffs in its history. It’s not that Meta doesn’t know how many people it needs. It’s that Meta doesn’t seem to know what kind of company it wants to be when it grows up.

The “Ideal Size” Paradox

During the Q4 2024 earnings call, Li was asked about headcount targets. Her answer was startlingly honest: “We don’t have a fixed target for what we think the ideal size of the company is.” She went on to explain that Meta is trying to balance efficiency with long-term investments in AI, the metaverse, and advertising infrastructure. But that balance is clearly shaky. If you don’t know your ideal size, how do you know where to cut? The answer, apparently, is everywhere.

The reported layoffs — which could affect up to 10% of Meta’s roughly 72,000 employees — are expected to hit hardest in non-engineering roles: recruiting, content moderation, marketing, and some administrative functions. But no team is safe. Even some engineering groups, particularly those working on legacy products like Facebook’s aging backend systems, are being asked to reapply for their own jobs.

The Metaverse Hangover Meets AI FOMO

This isn’t just another round of “efficiency” cuts. This is a company trying to pivot mid-air. Meta spent over $40 billion on Reality Labs between 2021 and 2024, building the metaverse that most people still don’t want. Now, with the generative AI boom, Mark Zuckerberg is suddenly all-in on large language models and AI assistants. That shift requires a very different workforce — fewer VR hardware engineers, more AI researchers and data center operators.

The problem is that you can’t re-skill a content moderator into a machine learning engineer overnight. So Meta is doing what big tech always does: firing the old roles and hiring for the new ones. But the “ideal size” comment reveals something deeper. Meta isn’t just cutting dead weight. It’s admitting it doesn’t have a clear model for how many people it needs to execute a strategy that keeps changing every six months.

What This Means for Employees

For current Meta employees, this is a deeply demoralizing moment. The company’s stock is up, its ad business is booming, and it just reported $46 billion in quarterly revenue. Yet the message from leadership is: we still might not need you. That creates a culture of paranoia, where even high-performing teams worry about being caught in a blanket reduction. Several anonymous posts on Blind and internal Slack channels describe the mood as “worse than 2022,” when Meta first cut 11,000 people.

One senior engineer, speaking on condition of anonymity, told me: “We’re being told to focus on impact, but no one can define what impact means anymore. Is it shipping code? Is it reducing costs? Is it just surviving the next reorg?” That confusion is the human cost of a company that doesn’t know its own shape.

The Broader Tech Industry Pattern

Meta is far from alone. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Salesforce have all gone through multiple rounds of cuts while simultaneously reporting record profits. The tech industry has normalized “efficiency layoffs” as a way to boost stock prices and appease investors who want lean operations. But Meta’s case is unique because of its identity crisis. Google knows it’s a search and AI company. Amazon knows it’s e-commerce and cloud. Meta? It still doesn’t know if it’s a social media company, a metaverse company, or an AI company. The layoffs reflect that indecision.

Zuckerberg’s recent public statements haven’t helped. He’s talked about “year of efficiency,” then “year of AI,” then “year of execution.” Employees joke internally that they need a calendar just to keep track of the company’s quarterly mission. The “ideal size” comment was a rare moment of executive candor, but it also confirmed what many feared: leadership is making it up as they go.

What Comes Next

The layoffs are expected to be announced in the coming weeks, likely before the end of the first quarter. Severance packages are rumored to be less generous than the 2022 round, which offered 16 weeks of base pay plus two weeks for every year of service. This time, sources say, Meta is aiming for four to eight weeks, depending on tenure. That’s a sign that the company wants to do this cheaply, quickly, and with minimal legal exposure.

But the bigger question is what happens after. If Meta doesn’t know its ideal size, how will it know when to stop cutting? How will it know when it has the right mix of AI talent, ad salespeople, and community managers? The honest answer is that it won’t. Meta will keep cutting until something breaks, and then it will hire again. That’s the new normal in big tech: constant churn, no loyalty, and a CFO who tells you the truth about how little the company actually knows.

For the tens of thousands of Meta employees still waiting for the axe to fall, that’s the scariest part. Not the layoff itself, but the realization that the company doesn’t have a map. It’s just flying blind, cutting what doesn’t fit, and hoping it lands somewhere that looks like a plan.

Ahmed Abed – News journalist