Facebook-parent company Meta is pouring billions of dollars into its artificial intelligence (AI) project, and the company’s ‘new’ priorities have triggered a massive wave of layoffs.According to a report, more than half of these job cuts have targeted two of biggest US states and Silicon Valley’s most traditional roles: software developers and middle managers.Citing public regulatory filings, Business Insider reports that more than half of Meta’s recent 8,000 job cuts – 4,665 workers – were concentrated in just two US states: California, where the company is headquartered, and Washington, home to one of its largest offices near Seattle.The data reveals a new reality for roles that have long been considered the untouchable backbone of the technology industry.

The end of ‘managers managing managers’

Middle managers took the hardest hit during this round of restructuring, accounting for more than 1,400 of the layoffs, which is nearly one-third of the total, as per the state filings. Proving even more costly, almost half of those terminated management positions belonged specifically to software engineering managers.The downsize directly aligns with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s ongoing corporate philosophy wherein, Zuckerberg has been actively restructuring the company to eliminate corporate bloat, since 2023. The CEO has stated publicly that he wants to move away from a corporate culture dominated by “managers managing managers”. Multiple reports have suggested that tech companies today increasingly favour smaller, leaner teams where bosses are expected to contribute directly to product output rather than just oversee others.Individual software engineers represented the second-most affected group in the data, with nearly 1,000 workers laid off.

Which roles grew and the ones slumped

The disclosure outlines a clear roadmap of which corporate departments Meta currently views as non-essential compared to its ‘business-critical’ AI priorities:In a statement responding to the findings, a Meta spokesperson explained: “The changes we are implementing vary by team and include layoffs, open role closures, and moving thousands of employees to business-critical priorities across the company”.In April, Zuckerberg explicitly told investors that Meta’s recent layoffs were driven by the urgent need to offset its massive AI hardware and research spending, rather than human jobs being directly replaced by automated algorithms.