Forced Exit
On November 9, Mark Zuckerberg announced the mass layoffs at the company: “I’ve decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13% and lay off more than 11,000 of our talented employees,” the billionaire wrote in a letter to staff. By the end of September 2022, Meta had 87,314 employees worldwide (known as extremist and banned in Russia).
There are also Russian-speaking experts among the discounts, which is evident from their profiles on LinkedIn and their posts on other social networks.
“I no longer work for Meta. Recession and hostilities leave little room for Russian Public Policy [внутри компании]. I will use my free time to collect my thoughts and recharge my batteries, and then I will start actively applying for any position that can keep me in the EU,” wrote David Kharebov, who lives in Berlin.
He noted on LinkedIn that he works as a public policy manager at Meta and is involved in partnerships with conflict monitoring, nonprofits, and civil society groups in Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union.
But in a conversation with socialbites.ca, Kharebov said he was “not laid off” and called this data “false information”. Immediately after that, Twitter closed his profile and gave access only to subscribers.
Until September 2021, Kharebov worked in the same position at Yandex. On Twitter, one of the former Meta employee’s followers suggested that Kharebov return to the Russian tech company.
And the developers too
“I woke up this morning and saw that I was out of the company’s systems and there was an email in my personal inbox saying we were ‘leaving Meta Management,’” Ivan Krivyakov, who lives in New York, USA, wrote in Near Jersey, New York.
A man originally from Tomsk on LinkedIn states that he is a senior developer at Facebook (the owner of Meta is considered an extremist and is banned in Russia). According to him, the decision was perceived as “less odd” than it could have been, as earlier information about the cuts had been leaked to the press.
Krivyakov also gave details of his separation. He stated that neither he nor his dismissed leader were involved in the decision-making processes.
In the comments, the former Meta employee has already started receiving job offers from other companies. The IT professional himself stated that he was looking for a job in an office or remote form in New York. In the past, he worked as CTO for Thomson Reuters and Morgan Stanley in Manhattan. Rus moved to Facebook in March 2020.
“I was deprived of work by an algorithm that evaluates the work of employees. Maybe it was an AI-based model, which is even scarier. Looking back, it looks a lot like Facebook. Look at the data and make a decision accordingly,” said the IT specialist.
Developer Dmitry Fedorov, who lives in Bellevue, Washington, near Seattle, found himself in a similar situation. He worked as a Production Engineer at Meta.
The day he was fired, he wrote briefly “What a beautiful day” on his profile and shared a photo on the beach. In the comments, colleagues at Meta wished Fedorov good luck in his search and noted that the company had lost a good specialist.
Prior to joining Meta in June 2020, he worked for Wargaming, a Belarus-based computer game developer best known for World of Tanks. The IT specialist completed his higher education in St. Petersburg State University of Aerospace Instrumentation.
Free “metovtsy” enters the market
On social media, former Meta employees admit that they and their laid-off colleagues can find jobs at other companies.
“I have conflicting memories of the meta, but I have always admired my colleagues and their skills while working there. So if you are hiring, this is the best opportunity to get talented specialists in the market,” one of them concluded.
Dismissed employees were promised sixteen weeks of paid leave and two additional weeks for each year they worked for the company. For them, the health insurance will be valid for another six months.
Meta management’s decision to cut back bypassed Russian-speaking experts in some positions. Their LinkedIn profiles show they continue to work for the company. Most often, these are software engineers who work both in the United States and abroad, for example, in London or Zurich.