Mark Zuckerberg says mass employee exodus is good, actually

Meta employees are leaving the company in droves as the company’s metaverse push confuses every other aspect of its business. You might expect that Mark Zuckerberg would be a little concerned about so many people jumping ship right now, but he’s actually not worried at all. The opposite, in fact. It turns out workforce attrition is actually a positive in his book.

That’s what Zuckerberg told analysts during a recent conference call, at least.

“I don’t think this sort of volatility that companies can face is always that unhealthy for making sure you have the right people,” Zuckerberg said. He later added that he believes many employees that stuck around during the worst of the pandemic didn’t care all that much about Meta’s work and simply needed a paying job instead.

Now, we could just take Zuckerberg’s words at face value; perhaps he truly does believe losing employees can be beneficial for weeding out the uninterested. But then again, this is Mark Zuckerberg we’re talking about. The man is kind of a master of deflection, at this point. (Or, at least, he thinks he is.)

Nothing to see here — Both Zuckerberg and Facebook CFO David Wehner did admit that the company’s attrition rate has increased as of late. But neither would go as far as to blame Meta’s internal functions for the exodus.

Wehner instead claimed on the call that the number of people leaving the company now is very similar to the numbers Meta saw before the pandemic. Zuckerberg tried to spin it into a positive.

“Over the long term, I think it’s going to make us a better company,” he said on the call.

Overall, Meta did report that its workforce has increased by 28 percent since this time last year, bringing the company as a whole up to about 78,000 employees.

Flip-flopping and controversy — Like Amazon, Meta seems to think it has no hand at all in high turnover rates. Meanwhile, the company’s employees are calling Zuckerberg “the Eye of Sauron,” and the CEO thinks that’s a good thing. So it’s not exactly shocking that Zukerberg might confuse a mass exodus with general workforce growth.

What Zuckerberg (willingly) fails to take into account here is just how much Meta has changed since March 2020. Meta was still Facebook in 2020. The company as a whole centered its mission on social media, rather than on virtual reality, hardware, the metaverse, and about a million other projects. Frances Haugen had not helped, leaking 10,000 internet documents in 2020. The company faced controversy, but not nearly so much high-profile controversy.

Zuckerberg can keep up his delusions as long as he’d like. But we know now that Meta is not even close to being invincible.