Meta is expected to lay off 8,000 employees next week, and workers are bracing for a 7 a.m. email on Wednesday that will tell them whether they still have jobs. The cuts would amount to about 10% of Meta’s global workforce, with roughly 500 of them expected in the Bay Area.
For many employees, the wait has already become part of the punishment. A longtime Meta worker said the situation was "as anxious and stressed as I have ever been at a job," and added that if someone is on a work machine, they are probably being surveilled. The employee said Meta is using workers to train AI to do everyone’s job, describing the company’s approach as "we’re training your replacement, and we’re not paying you more for it."
Meta’s layoff plans land in a year when the tech industry has already shed more than 100,000 workers since January, and the company’s own employees have been living with the fear for months. On one team, staff have been on edge about cuts since January, while a couple of years ago a Meta engineer wrote a script to comb through internal profiles so users could list all employees in a given state. That kind of internal visibility has only sharpened worries that the company knows far more about its workforce than the workforce knows about itself.
The anxiety also comes as Meta asks workers to use and train AI products even as they worry those tools could replace them. Employees are being pushed deeper into systems that increasingly measure and monitor their work, and the company recently began key-stroke logging employee activity. That combination has turned a layoff notice into more than a headcount decision; it has become a test of how much trust remains inside one of Silicon Valley’s best-known companies.
A decade ago, Meta was still seen in San Francisco as a place people fought to get into, with six-figure pay, free food, gym memberships, laundry services and stock that seemed to climb without end. The picture now is different. If the layoffs land as expected next week, they will show how sharply the company’s priorities have shifted, and how quickly the promise of a dream job in tech can turn into a job where employees refresh their inboxes at dawn, waiting for a message that decides their future.
