A freshly axed Meta employee warned yet another round of cuts will follow Wednesday’s brutal layoffs in the months ahead — despite assurances from CEO Mark Zuckerberg that this year’s bloodbath is over.
Brittany Pierson, a Dallas-based content designer who spent over four years at Meta, said she actually felt “so much relief” after getting laid off because she had long anticipated that her role was destined to disappear because of artificial intelligence.
“If you survive, then you need to start training yourself on an entirely new role that AI can’t replace — all while mentally preparing yourself for the next layoff, which, by the way, is rumored to be happening in August,” Pierson said on Instagram, one of many social media posts shared by ex-Meta workers Wednesday.
“That’s not normal. It’s not healthy,” she added in the two-minute video.
Pierson’s claim of additional layoffs contradicts Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s pledge that the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp will not ax any more workers this year.
“I want to be clear that we do not expect other company-wide layoffs this year,” Zuckerberg said, according to Reuters.
“I also want to acknowledge that we haven’t been as clear as we aspire to be in our communication, and that’s one area I want to make sure we improve.”
Wednesday marked the rollout of Meta’s previously announced plan to slash roughly 10% of its workforce — eliminating an estimated 8,000 jobs as the company pours billions into AI and restructures the social media giant around the technology.
Meta has framed the layoffs as part of a “continued effort to run the company more efficiently” while shifting thousands of workers onto AI-focused initiatives, according to internal communications reported by Business Insider.
Online, current and former employees painted a picture of a workforce rattled by seemingly nonstop restructuring, collapsing morale and fears that AI is steadily hollowing out white-collar jobs across Silicon Valley.
Some vented their frustrations on the workplace message board Blind, which allows users to post anonymously after using their work email to verify their identity.
Laid-off while ‘pregnant’
One laid-off worker claimed to have lost her job at Meta while seven months pregnant.
“I’m pretty devastated to hear the news that I’m laid off. I informed my manager that I was pregnant and initiated a parental leave request officially. Timing feels worse as I’m expecting my first baby this July … I’m lost and feeling very stressed about how to go handle pregnancy,” the worker wrote.
Another employee admitted to feeling “bad for surviving” the companywide culling.
“Please don’t think people laid off from Meta are bad performers, I’m an average performing scrub and I feel so bad for surviving when my teammate got laid off,” the worker said.
Just before the layoffs began, one Meta employee wrote that the company’s workforce was “in desperate need of therapy.”
“The amount of disrespect and chaos we deal with every day is unreal,” the person wrote. “Meta employees are in desperate need of therapy after all the constant layoffs and reorgs. Mental health is at an all-time low.”
The Post has sought comment from Meta and Pierson.
Matthew Young, a Seattle-based software engineer at Meta who had been with Meta for a year, told The Post in an interview that he found out via a 4 a.m. email he was among those who got the ax. The prospect of layoffs had been hanging over his team for months, he said, calling the climate “demoralizing.”
Still, the 29-year-old said he doesn’t Meta will be able to replace the work he did with AI.
“That’s the story they’re telling us,” Young said. “Does AI increase productivity? Yeah. Does it replace people? No.”
Young said he was given four months of severance and he will begin looking for a new job.
“It’s not really a reflection on my own personal ability,” Young said. “I don’t think I’m going to have much of a hard time getting a job elsewhere.”
Pierson said the latest cuts felt fundamentally different from earlier Meta layoffs she witnessed.
“In the past, when we knew a layoff was coming, the mentality was very much: okay, we just got to get through it, and if you survive, things will eventually go back to normal,” she said.
“This was just phase one of eventually phasing out that role entirely due to AI. Not just at Meta, but across the industry.”
More to come?
A Meta employee affected by Wednesday’s layoffs told The Post the company will likely do a “performance-based” round of layoffs later this year, “so they can label it as not a mass layoff.”
Asked about Zuckerberg’s reputation internally, the worker didn’t mince words.
“He doesn’t give a s–t,” the person said. “He’s focused on his bottom line.”
The employee said morale inside Meta has cratered amid fears of AI wiping out jobs across the tech industry.
“I don’t think it has the security or longevity that it used to,” the employee said. “I think people are going to be making big career pivots right now to just escape tech.
“In the past, if you got laid off from Meta, you could go and jump to another company like Google, Amazon or these other big tech companies,” the worker added.
“But now with this layoff, knowing that it is because of AI, you can jump to one of those other companies, but you could also end up being laid off there six months later.”
The employee also described mounting internal pressure to incorporate Meta’s in-house AI tools into day-to-day work — even when it meant replacing tasks workers felt capable of doing themselves.
“We were monitoring our AI usage,” the employee said.
Managers appeared especially anxious during the restructuring as Meta flattened organizational layers and pushed some supervisors into lower-ranking, individual contributor roles, according to the source.
“The managers are living in more fear than anyone,” the worker said.
