A former recruiter for Meta said she was paid a $190,000 salary to do “nothing” at the social media giant — where CEO Mark Zuckerberg in recent weeks has revealed plans to slash 21,000 jobs.
Career strategist Madelyn Machado posted a video on TikTok on Friday titled “Getting paid $190k to do nothing at Meta” — recalling a six-month stint at the owner of Facebook and Instagram that ended last spring.
Machado said in her TikTok video that upon her arrival at the company in September 2021, she was told by her bosses not to hire anyone.
“We weren’t expected to hire anybody for the first six months, even the first year,” she said. “This is something they tell you when you start.”
“That really blew my mind,” she added. “Like ‘Perfect, I’m just going to ride this out for a year,’ obviously I didn’t make that.”
The Menlo Park, Calif.-based social media giant, along with other blue-chip tech firms including Google, Amazon and Microsoft, have fired tens of thousands of workers in recent months as they reverse their pandemic-era hiring sprees that were meant to keep up with explosive growth.
In her viral video — viewed more than 342,000 times as of Wednesday — Machado revealed that instead of hiring, her days at Meta were filled with “learning.”
She praised Meta for offering “the best onboarding and training I’ve seen from any company ever.”
Machado said that the “expectations” her bosses had at the beginning of her tenure at Meta were “learning and taking it all in.”
She said the experience was akin to “drinking from a fire hose” — or being inundated with information.
Machado then described “the crazy part,” saying: “We had so many team meetings.”
“Why are we meeting? We’re not hiring nobody,” she said.
Machado told her 221,000 TikTok followers that the meetings were “just to hear how everyone else isn’t hiring anybody.”
“And also, I was on a team where everyone was new, so none of us were hiring anybody,” she added.
Machado said that she, her colleagues, and her boss were “trying to figure things out.”
“I really miss it,” she added. “I wasn’t doing s–t pretty much. Um, that’s nice.”
@maddie_macho Replying to @cassbass94 why I got fired at Meta #fired #meta #metalayoffs ♬ original sound – Maddie | The Career Finesser
In a follow-up video, Machado told her followers that she was fired in spring 2022 by the company because an earlier video in which she touts the benefits package she received went viral.
Machado said her superiors weren’t pleased when she revealed that the firm offers “$4,000 in baby cash” as well as “$3,000 for child care reimbursement.”
Facebook this month announced a second round of layoffs impacting 10,000 jobs — on the heels of the 13% workforce reduction claiming 11,000 jobs that the tech firm unveiled in November.
Zuckerberg told investors earlier this year that 2023 would be Meta’s “year of efficiency.”
He also instituted a new “flattening” policy aimed at shedding middle managers so as to remove bureaucratic layers from the corporate structure.
Meta has been offering nonessential managers buyout packages while cutting teams.
On Wall Street, Meta’s stock price was trading 0.5% higher as of 10:42 a.m. Eastern time.
Ojelabi, the publisher of Freelanews, is an award winning and professionally trained mass communicator and a recipient of the D9112 Superstar Icon Award, who writes ruthlessly about pop culture, religion, politics and entertainment.
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