Layoffs and hiring freeze in Tech - is it starting? I was tracking Robinhood doing 10% layoffs, Netflix starting layoffs (mostly marketing dept), hiring freeze at Meta/Facebook, Adobe, Amex.

I guess because Fintech is a hot sector within tech right now

Got this from BLIND

From David Wehner, CFO:

Last week I shared our latest earnings results. While we're optimistic about opportunities ahead, we need to ensure we are making focused, balanced investments to support our most strategic priorities. We're facing headwinds including slower revenue growth than anticipated at the start of the year. This is due to a number of factors including the loss of signal from iOS changes, business challenges resulting from the war in Ukraine, and the general macroeconomic environment. Also, as with much of the tech industry, we had two years of exceptional growth as more activity moved online during the pandemic. The resulting acceleration of e-commerce led to outsized growth, but this growth has eased off as the pandemic restrictions have lifted and more people are spending time offline and returning to pre-pandemic spending patterns. This shift has resulted in an industry-wide downturn that is affecting us too. We need to take another look at our priorities and make some tough decisions about what projects we go after in both the short and medium-term to achieve the lower expense guidance we committed to during earnings.

While we're still going through our reprioritization, we know this will have an effect on hiring for the rest of the year. We came into 2022 with really aggressive growth targets and have hired at an incredible pace this year so far — we hired more engineers in Q1 than all of 2021. We've brought thousands of talented people into the company that are helping us work towards our ambitious goals and 2022 priorities. However, as we look towards the second half, we're going to adjust those targets in a couple of ways:

1) Reducing our hiring targets for 2022. This means hiring fewer people than we initially forecast. We're still working out what this means for each org, but this will affect almost every team in the company. We're entering into the H2 planning cycle, and this will be an opportunity to reprioritize work to make sure we're all focused on the most important things and the top priorities for the company. Your org leaders will follow up with more information over the coming days and weeks, but today we're announcing some changes on the Engineering side — look out for a post in Engineering FYI for details.
2) Reviewing headcount allocation to make sure it's aligned to our top company priorities given our modified hiring targets. This will help us resource the projects that we're prioritizing for the rest of the year. You'll learn more about this from your functional and org leads over the next couple of weeks.

We're in a strong position with a healthy business, and we feel optimistic about the opportunities to re-accelerate growth, particularly through unlocking new revenue streams through Reels monetization, incorporating AI into our ads system to overcome signal loss from iOS changes, growing business messaging and bringing the metaverse to life. But we also have to be responsible by responding to the unpredictable market forces that have put pressure on our business over the past few months. In practice, this is a valuable forcing function to make sure we're prioritizing more effectively and are all working on the most important things.

We'll share more details as we have them.
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From Miranda Kalinowski, global head of recruiting:

Hi everyone —

As Dave Wehner shared this morning, we're taking a more conservative approach to expense and headcount growth over the rest of the year, given the headwinds facing our business and this means hiring fewer people than we initially forecast for 2022. We're still working out what this means for each org, but this will affect hiring goals for almost every team across the company. Based on this refreshed guidance, we know we need to adjust our hiring targets across the board starting with Eng. I am committed to keeping you all updated as we have new information to hand. Here's what we know so far….

What this means right now in Engineering Recruiting

- At this time, we will need to pause Eng hiring for IC6 and M1 hiring, effective immediately, with the exception of ML IC5+ candidates.

- We will not extend any new offers to IC5 and M1+ Eng candidates (except ML IC5+) for these select pipelines and will be canceling future scheduled interviews.

- We will continue with scheduled interviews at onsite for IC6/M2 Eng candidates, but will not be adding any net-new candidates as we are confident we have enough people in process to meet our hiring goals.

- We will continue to actively hire for ML IC5+ candidates and IC7+ candidates across all SWE areas, and will pause Director openings to asses our needs on a case by case basis.

- In addition to ML IC5+ and IC7+ hiring, MTR recruiting will also pivot to other hiring prioritizes across Product XFN, Reality Labs, and Infra.

- Please note, this means we'll also pause additional IC3/4 Eng hiring at this point. However, we will continue to honor rEng conversions and will re-evaluate net-new rENG STE hiring.