Welcome back to our Workplace newsletter. Breaking news: Salesforce is planning a round of layoffs that could hit as many as 2,500 workers as the software giant faces a new activist investor challenge from Starboard Value. Those plans come on the heels of the large reductions at Twitter, Stripe, and Lyft — and as Meta employees wait for news about the company’s first major layoffs in its 18-year history.

— Allison Levitsky, reporter (email | twitter)

Meta layoffs could be coming soon

Clearly, the Big Tech bloodbath isn’t over. “Many thousands” of Meta employees are expected to lose their jobs Wednesday morning, according to The Wall Street Journal.

• Meta declined to comment on these apparent plans, and by Tuesday morning, the company hadn’t disclosed any layoffs to California’s Employment Development Department in compliance with the state’s WARN law, a spokesperson for the department told me.
• There’s no official word on where Meta might concentrate the cuts, or exactly how many employees could be affected, but Mark Zuckerberg reportedly mentioned the recruiting and business teams as part of the layoff in a Tuesday meeting with executives.
• Gergely Orosz, the author of newsletter The Pragmatic Engineer, tweeted that he’s been told that Meta directors’ Wednesday calendars are full of “slots for layoffs conversations” and that 10% of the company’s engineers could be affected.

Zuck’s comments in the last two weeks hold some clues about his thinking. He also claimed responsibility for over-hiring in his meeting with executives on Tuesday, according to The Journal. And on Meta’s Q3 earnings call on Oct. 26, Zuckerberg defended Meta’s investments in the metaverse, which he said will be “of historic importance” even if they’re far from profitable now.

• Zuckerberg said Meta would “keep investing heavily” in growing its teams working on its AI discovery engine, its ads and business messaging platforms, and its metaverse initiatives. “The internal indications I’ve seen suggest we’re doing leading work and are on the right track with these investments,” Zuckerberg said on the call.
• Those comments came two days after Meta investor Altimeter Capital issued an open letter urging Zuckerberg and Meta’s board to cut its head count expense by at least 20%, reduce its annual capital expenditure from $30 billion to $25 billion or less, and restrict its investment in Reality Labs to $5 billion per year.
• Meta reported a net loss of more than $9.4 billion on Reality Labs between Jan. 1 and Sept. 30, up from around $6.9 billion year-over-year.

Zuck was certainly clear on one thing: Most teams in the company will “either stay flat or shrink over the next year.” By the end of 2023, Meta expects to be “roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization” than it is today.

• The company’s headcount was 87,314 at the end of September, up 28% from a year before.
• Meta has already been finding other ways to reduce head count, reportedly including departmental reorganizations and rescinding some internship offers.

One question now is whether Zuck will cave to investor pressure and make cuts in Reality Labs. Some analysts have also raised eyebrows at Meta’s spending and direction on AI, said Niya Dragova, the co-founder of Candor, a startup that helps public tech company employees manage their stock-based compensation.

• “The last earnings call analysis was, honestly, really carnage,” Dragova told me. “They have to show something really drastic and decisive.”

Speaking of drastic

Salesforce’s layoffs are expected to affect roughly 2,000 people or more for “performance” issues, with several hundred others to be placed on a 30-day review, sources told Protocol. Unnamed sources told Axios and CNBC that Salesforce had let go of fewer than 1,000 employees this week, and the company sent a statement to both outlets that its “sales performance process drives accountability” and that “unfortunately, that can lead to some leading the business.”

The company is under pressure from investors to produce a greater return. Last month, Starboard Value disclosed a “significant” stake in Salesforce, Protocol’s Joe Williams reports.

Read the full story.

​Sponsored content from Conga

Automation also ensures consistency and standardization. The more automated the process is, the more you ensure that it’s going to be consistent every single time, whereas with a manual process, three different people may do it three different ways.

Learn more

Elon in your inbox

Is Elon Musk reading Twitter employees’ Slack DMs? Last week, the new Chief Twit tweeted a screenshot of a DM that Twitter safety and integrity head Yoel Roth sent in May. Now that Musk has access to the company’s trove of internal messages, Twitter’s Slack has tightened up noticeably.

“A group of us were saying, ‘Oh shit, what did I ever say about Elon Musk on Slack?’” one employee told Protocol reporter Lizzy Lawrence. That said, gaining access to employees’ DMs and looking closely at them involves searching through a “massive data dump,” said Matt Haughey, a former senior writer at Slack.

Read the full story.

Twilio’s missteps

Twilio “can’t seem to catch a break,” writes Protocol reporter Aisha Counts. Demand for the SaaS giant’s communication APIs caused it to grow 50% or more over the past several years. In recent months, Twilio has found itself in the same bleak place as many other companies: slowing hiring, laying off 11% of its workforce, and forecasting revenue projections that fall short of its 30% annual growth target.

In an interview with Counts, Chief Operating Officer Khozema Shipchandler owned up to the internal missteps that, along with macroeconomic conditions, led to these outcomes — and revealed how the company plans to move forward.

Read the full story.

Some personnel news

Anyone else having a bad case of Great Resignation whiplash? It’s hard to keep up with which tech companies are growing, shrinking, floating, or sinking. We’re here to help.

⬇️ A Twitter engineer tells the MIT Technology Review that the company’s pared-down workforce isn’t enough to keep the site running properly — and explains how he thinks it will break down.

⬇️ Attrition at Apple is making hard to find a head of hardware design to replace Evans Hankey, who is leaving after three years, Bloomberg reported.

For more news on hiring, firing, and rewiring, see our tech company tracker.

Sponsored content from Conga

Amid current economic uncertainty, every business is moving to a stage where we need to do more with less through improved efficiency and automations. When you move to a life cycle management solution, your organization gains the predictability that it needs all the time, and especially right now.

Learn more

Around the internet

A roundup of workplace news from the farthest corners of the internet.

Twitter employees are sharing photos of themselves sleeping on the floor of the office so they can put in long hours. But maybe they shouldn’t? (HuffPost)

This tech worker doesn’t want to see her manager’s nail appointments in their public work calendar. (The Daily Dot)

Ready to stream your next all-hands to a movie theater? Zoom and AMC are working on a moviehouse videoconferencing offering. (The Verge)

Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to workplace@protocol.com.

Way back in March, your friendly Protocol Climate team offered you some tips for writing a climate plan that doesn’t suck. Surely you took that advice. But if for some reason you didn’t, the United Nations has your back.

---

The U.N. dropped a 10-step how-to guide to ensure net zero plans are real talk and not greenwashing, care of an expert panel that has a name much too long to print. And it’s well worth a read whether you're a CSO looking to improve your company’s climate plan or a Big Tech watchdog who wants to make sure companies are doing the right thing.

Among the 10 recommendations, a few jump out. No shade to recommendation one (publicly announce a net zero plan), but some of the others are salient and a little less remedial, particularly for tech companies:

• Recommendation three deals with the role carbon credits should play in a net zero plan. The answer is that they need to be high quality and show both additionality (cutting emissions that otherwise wouldn’t have happened) and permanence (storing said emissions for a long period of time).
• For the tech industry, which is increasingly turning to carbon credits and offsets to “prove” it’s serious about net zero, the recommendation — along with a slew of reporting on carbon markets’ failures — should be a wake-up call.
• Recommendation five calls for phasing out fossil fuels. While Big Tech isn’t directly drilling oil wells, it is actively aiding the industry.
• “All net zero pledges should include specific targets aimed at ending the use of and/or support for fossil fuels,” the report says. That’s a clear invitation for companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and others providing computing to sunset their support for Big Oil.
• Recommendations six and 10 call for aligning advocacy and speeding up regulations as opposed to relying on voluntary schemes.
• The tech industry has had fraught relationships with trade groups that have, at times, opposed climate regulations. The report also makes tech companies need to have an escalation strategy if trade groups block legislation, policies, or regulations that could help them reach net zero.

Big Tech is already doing some things right. The industry is better at setting climate goals than other sectors of the Fortune 500.

• Workers have pushed leadership to strengthen those plans. (A key part of recommendation four is getting workers involved, so head-pat to some CEOs.)
• Yet the industry is also starting to hemorrhage talent for not turning net zero plans into action fast enough or setting interim targets (another key recommendation from the report).
• The new report makes clear exactly what work tech companies still need to do if they want to get on track.

Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao said Tuesday the crypto powerhouse signed a deal to acquire rival FTX.

---

CZ said in a tweet that FTX “asked for our help,” adding that due to “a significant liquidity crunch,” Binance had signed a nonbinding letter of intent to acquire FTX “to protect users.”

FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried also said in a tweet that the company had “come to an agreement on a strategic transaction with Binance for FTX,” adding, “Things have come full circle.” Binance was an early strategic investor in FTX, but FTX bought out its stake last year, with Bankman-Fried suggesting the companies differed on regulatory issues.

The announcement follows a Twitter tit-for-tat between the two crypto giants over questions related to the finances of Alameda Research, the trading house started by Bankman-Fried. CZ announced that Binance was liquidating its holdings of FTX’s native FTT token, describing the move as “post-exit risk management, learning from” luna, a token Binance had backed that imploded earlier this year.

CZ also suggested a deeper rift between the two companies, adding, “We gave support before, but we won't pretend to make love after divorce. We are not against anyone. But we won't support people who lobby against other industry players behind their backs.”

Binance is crypto’s biggest exchange with a daily trading volume of roughly $31 billion, according to CoinMarketCap. FTX is third with about $3.5 billion daily trading volume.

FTX had appeared to halt withdrawals Tuesday before the announcement, according to on-chain analytics cited by some observers on Twitter. Bankman-Fried said the deal would allow withdrawals to resume.

Salesforce is preparing for a major round of layoffs that could affect as many as 2,500 workers across the software vendor, Protocol has learned, in a bid to cut costs amid a new activist investor challenge and harsh economic conditions.

---

The company plans to lay off a large number of individuals, roughly 2,000 people or more, for "performance" issues, according to both an industry source and a former employee. Several hundred more, likely those workers who fall under a protected group like individuals with disabilities, will be placed on a 30-day review, with the intention of letting them go once that concludes, according to one source. It was unclear when the layoffs would begin, the sources added, as discussions on the plan remain ongoing. However, they are likely to happen before the Thanksgiving holiday.

Salesforce spokesperson Carolyn Guss did not respond to repeated requests for comments. Chief people officer Brent Hyder and chief equality officer Lori Castillo Martinez also did not respond to request for comment. However, in statements provided to other news outlets following publication, Salesforce confirmed it eliminated hundreds of jobs on Monday.

When Salesforce underwent layoffs in August 2020, it provided 60 days' notice and severance, including placement services and a few months of benefits to affected employees. If the company is taking the stance that workers are being let go for under-performance, it's unclear if it would extend the same type of package.

Investors are increasingly demanding a greater return from Salesforce, which has always funneled its profits toward growth, including spending billions to acquire companies like Slack and Tableau. The company is also now facing pressure from activist investor Starboard, which recently disclosed a "significant" but still unknown stake in Salesforce.

Salesforce previously laid off roughly 90 contract workers and implemented a hiring freeze through January 2023. At the time, a spokesperson said that "limited hiring continues" but that "most departments have reached their hiring goals for the fiscal year."

COVID didn’t really bring new secular technology trends. Instead, the pandemic sped up the progress of changes that were already starting to be made. Businesses reimagined their digital processes. Cloud adoption increased. And security concerns became a higher priority. Each of these changes brings new risks, but the right processes and technology offer businesses significant positive benefits.

It’s easy to get caught up in new technologies and their possibilities. But the core of this shift comes down to the basics of good enterprise security and governance. Businesses need to make sure the right people get the right access to the right technology. On the flip side, they must also make sure that only the right people are accessing the technology at any time.

In the past, security was typically the responsibility of the IT department. But as businesses now understand that threat mitigation and legal complications pose serious risks, security discussions have risen to the C-suite and board of directors level. Organizations realize that the same forces that solve risk and compliance challenges can also improve workforce productivity and reduce complexity.

Identity’s increasingly critical role

Employees are no longer all in the office. Some work from home full time. Others may work hybrid. Organizations are still experimenting with different models to see what works best for both the business and their employees. The future of work will likely continue to evolve over the next several months and years. However, the challenge is determining how to keep the drastically changing hybrid work environment secure.

Organizations are increasingly turning to identity-first security to secure access to their most critical resources. Gartner’s Identity and Access Management (IAM) Magic Quadrant reports that by 2025 converged IAM platforms will be the preferred adoption method for Access Management, Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) and Privileged Access Management (PAM) in over 70% of new deployments, driven by more comprehensive risk mitigation requirements.

With this approach, the foundational level for security is understanding the identity of all users and each of their devices. Whether it’s an employee, a contractor, an endpoint or a server, every entity within an organization needs to be authenticated into systems and gain authorization to perform actions.

Identity has become even more critical to technology executives as the stakes have grown. It’s easy to think of security as simply protecting the organization. But in reality, improving security through identity-first security processes provides many often unseen benefits. With the right level of security, employees have the access they need across the organization, and teams speed up tool and technology adoption. Identity-based security enables the business to grow and innovate as much as it protects.

Compliance and security tools need to improve

In the past, compliance-focused industries like identity and access governance had to make some tough tradeoffs. They were tasked with keeping the business secure and compliant with regulations. But that often meant making it tough for employees to get their jobs done. At the same time, this approach often added more work and a greater burden on IT professionals trying to keep systems up and running.

Legacy compliance and security tools were often the problem. They lacked the ability to easily integrate with modern applications and were challenging to implement. Not to mention, the technology was miserable for users, which made it hard to get buy-in for broad adoption.

But now, cloud technologies have democratized access and adoption. With governance and privileged access solutions, more users within an organization can compliantly engage with applications either as an end user or as an authorizer. When all employees have access to data, applications and infrastructure to do their job in an efficient manner, the entire business grows and moves forward.

How the world should work

Modern solutions must work with today’s speed of innovation and adoption. Otherwise, the business wastes time and loses momentum. Organizations need tools to be up and running within days, not weeks or months. Employees expect the tools to be easy to use, and the IT team needs the technology to be easy to maintain. When the technology delivers a seamless and frictionless experience, productivity and agility increases. Most importantly, the benefits happen without sacrificing security.

As the first independent born-in-the-cloud identity provider, Okta applied its modern approach to identity and access management to IGA with Okta Identity Governance, which is now generally available. Okta Identity Governance, which is part of Okta’s broader workforce identity vision, unifies IAM and IGA to improve enterprises’ security posture. Additionally, the Okta technology mitigates modern security risks, improves IT efficiency and meets today’s productivity and compliance challenges.

Technology needs to meet employees and the IT team where they are. Deeply integrated into Okta’s existing IAM solutions, Okta Identity Governance provides an unparalleled comprehensive view of every user’s access patterns. With enriched user context, reviewers can simplify the access certification process while making informed decisions that ensure only the right people have access to resources. At the same time, employees can access easy-to-use self-service access request capabilities. Because the technology is tightly integrated with collaboration tools built on a converged IAM and governance solution, organizations can automate access provisioning of both the enterprise’s applications and cloud resources.

Moving forward with identity-first security

Security tools should accelerate technology adoption. But often, the tools actually disrupt and slow down forward movement. With Okta tools, organizations have the compliance and security protection to grow while still protecting themselves from risk.

Businesses are more secure and protected with technology that gets the right users the right level of access for the right amount of time. When a business embraces technology it is more secure and productive but using a cloud-based platform takes it to a new level — the IT teams are more efficient while reducing significant complexity. And instead of focusing on security and access, the organization can focus on what it does best: serving customers and growing the business through innovative solutions.