They are not exactly trimming 'fat'. This latest round had numerous people who were getting high marks and even AE. There is some meme going around that this was a performance based layoff and it absolutely was not.
Trimming the fat is about organizational fat. Some teams could be bloated, or unnecessary, etc.
I don’t know what went on in meta, but a few years ago I worked on a product team in a tech company. That team had a dedicated sub-team who reworked our AWS hosting every year. The company had a full Dev-Ops team to do it for us. Those 4-5 people were just making busy work and design docs in their name. While I’ve since quit and moved on, i hear that team experienced layoffs this spring. That’s “fat” which can be trimmed even if the engineers are very capable people.
