“Raise your hand if you know who’s getting fired?” a Meta employee wrote in an online chat for the company’s engineers this month. “Fire emoji if you think it’s a dumpster fire.”

In response, his colleagues posted dozens of tiny flame emojis.

“I’ve already been fired,” added a former Meta employee who worked in the company’s business unit for almost four years before most of his team was fired this year. “But who can keep track?”

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Meta, said that 2023 will be the “year of efficiency” for his company. So far, efficiency has translated into mass layoffs. He’s had two rounds of cuts in the past six months, with two more to come; this will eliminate over 21,000 people. Mr. Zuckerberg is also filling 5,000 open positions, representing 30 percent of his company’s workforce.

At the same time, some of Meta’s top executives have moved on and are running large parts of the Silicon Valley company from their new homes in places like London and Tel Aviv.

Layoffs and absent leadership, as well as concerns that Mr. Zuckerberg is making a poor bet on the future, have sapped Meta employee morale, according to nine current and former employees, as well as reports reviewed by The New York Times.

Once one of the most coveted jobs in Silicon Valley not so long ago, workers at Meta face an increasingly dangerous future. The company’s share price is down 43 percent from its peak 19 months ago. More layoffs, Mr. Zuckerberg said on his Facebook page will appear this month. Some of those cuts may have been due to engineering teams, two employees said, which was unthinkable before the problems started last year.

“Right now, many employees feel like they are in limbo,” says Erin Sumner, Global HR Director at Delete me, who was fired from Facebook in November. “They say it’s the Hunger Games meeting Lord of the Flies, where everyone is trying to prove their worth to the management.”

Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is not the only big tech company to cut costs. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce and others have laid off thousands of employees in recent months, reduced office space, ditched benefits and abandoned pilot initiatives.

But the Meta seems to be facing the biggest challenges. Last year, the company reported a quarterly decline in revenue for the first time since it went public in 2012.

While his Meta colleagues are chasing a wave of AI innovation, Mr. Zuckerberg has bet big on the Metaverse, the immersive online world. But it’s unclear whether consumers will embrace his vision the way he hopes. Although the company has sold 20 million virtual reality headsets — more than any other company that makes similar technology — it has struggled to get customers to return to using the product regularly.

Many at Meta have already been skeptical of Mr. Zuckerberg’s shift towards the metaverse. Those concerns have intensified as consumer enthusiasm for the virtual world has lagged behind, employees say.

The absence of many top executives from the Meta headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., exacerbates concerns. Zuckerberg, 38, is on maternity leave after the birth of his third child, but regularly meets with executives on important topics, according to three Meta employees. (AI is at the top of this list.)

Even though Mr. Zuckerberg encouraged ordinary employees to return to the company’s headquarters, several of his senior assistants left.

Naomi Gleith, an early Meta employee and now Head of Product, recently moved to New York City, joining three other Meta senior managers and executives based there. Guy Rosen, director of information security at Meta, returned to Tel Aviv, where he lived when his Onavo company was acquired. Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, lives in London. And Javier Olivan, COO of Meta, divides his time between Europe and Silicon Valley.

While executives joined Meta’s weekly meetings via video chat, their absence from the Menlo Park offices was felt, employees say, especially after Mr. Zuckerberg recently stressed that he expects employees to return to the office.

A spokesperson for Meta said its executives continued to make regular trips to Silicon Valley offices.

Inside Meta, there is a need to demonstrate that people are hard at work, two employees said. Recent job surveys have come under scrutiny. Employees, especially middle managers, are asked to explain why their work is critical to achieving Meta’s goals.

Some employees are trying to look busier, two people said. This has made people more possessive about their work, which means less collaboration with co-workers, according to people. One person described the atmosphere as “cut-throat”.

The meta declined to comment on internal affairs.

While the first two rounds of layoffs heavily affected business and recruiting teams, the cuts expected this month will be in technical departments, including engineers, which surprised employees, four employees who were not allowed to speak to reporters said. According to them, insiders expect the technical cuts to affect teams within WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook.

In one of his regular employee Q&A sessions this year, Mr. Zuckerberg said there is no “perfect way” to layoffs, and that he would be wrong to provide more information about upcoming layoffs as news. some of the cuts began to seep into the press. Information previously informed at the meeting.

Meta employees have created memes and jokes about how much time employees have left. In messaging groups and workplace chats in recent weeks, they’ve used skull and crossbones emoji to signal each other that they might be part of layoffs, according to screenshots seen by The Times.

The rest complain about the reduction of bonuses and privileges. One engineer created a bot that automatically calculated the loss in value of Meta shares held by employees as part of their compensation package.

The company is also cutting back on some of its generous perks once thought necessary to attract top talent. Last year, Meta stopped providing free laundry services to employees and moved dinner to later in the evening, a way to cut back on the number of workers loading up free food to take home.

Workers have complained in internal chats that the company is cutting back on amenities. One was upset that there were no more cereals in the office, and snacks in “micro kitchen“were not replenished so regularly. Many felt that cafeteria options had gone downhill.

Employee travel expenses are also being scrutinized and employees have been asked to reduce non-essential travel.

At WhatsApp, Meta’s popular messaging product, insiders expect fewer cuts and structural changes from the business than the rest of the company, two current employees said. Mr. Zuckerberg wants to increase the frequency of delivering new, revenue-generating features on WhatsApp, which he bought nine years ago for $19 billion.

While employees complain that they don’t hear enough from Mr. Zuckerberg, he did surprise some this year when he joined a discussion group for Metamates, as employees are called.

Workers gossiped about a recent news article noting that Sergey Brin and Larry Page had returned to Google to help with the company’s AI strategy, said two employees who witnessed the exchange. One worker joked that the return of the founders might inspire Mr. Zuckerberg to return to programming at Facebook.

Later, Mr. Zuckerberg responded to employees who were unaware that he was lurking in the discussion.

“I never left,” he wrote.